Fluorescent magnesium paddle wheels

The first luminescent complex to contain magnesium has been made by chemists in India and the UK, interested in designing metal complexes with applications in organic light emitting diode (OLED) display technology.

In the new compound three magnesium ions form a perfectly straight line coordinated by tris-hydrazone ligands. When viewed down this line the structure resembles a paddle wheel. Remarkably, while the free ligands themselves do not fluoresce, the complex does, both in solution and the solid state.

To study the potential for using the compound in OLED technology, Vadapalli Chandrasekhar and co-workers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and the University of Liverpool have also shown that solid thin films and polymer-doped thin films in which the complex is uniformly dispersed retain this luminescent behaviour.

The teams hope that by tuning the ligand’s properties they will be able to make different coloured OLED materials.

Caroline Moore