1. "Nindigo": A new bridging ligand
Robin Hicks, Department of Chemistry, University of Victoria
Metal complexes are useful for everything from making new drugs (as catalysts) to advanced technological materials. In many cases, a particular property requires metals to interact, or “communicate” with one another. The ligands which connect metals together in clusters therefore take center stage as the component which controls how (if) metals interact. It would be ideal to have a so-called bridging ligand whose structure could be altered at will to modulate how metals interact and therefore tailor whatever application one has in mind. Unfortunately no such bridging ligand system exists.
We’ve recently succeeded in converting indigo (the pigment that makes blue jeans blue) into a new structure we’ve dubbed “Nindigo”, in which the chemical groups attached to nitrogen can be changed simply by using different amines. The “Nindigo” structure can successfully bind two metals (e.g. palladium) and we’ve discovered that these two-metal systems actually have a lot of interesting colour and electronic properties which come from the ligand, not the metal! We’re currently looking at the light-emitting and catalytic properties of these new complexes.