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Inorganic chemistry

Making iron glow

Nature volume 543, pages 627–628 (2017)Cite this article

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An iron complex has been made that has a long-lived excited state and emits light at room temperature as a result of a charge-transfer process. This breakthrough might allow the production of cheap solar cells. See Letter p.695

The incorporation of iron into light-absorbing compounds known as photosensitizers offers great promise for solar-energy applications. To realize these applications, the light-activated excited state of an iron-containing photosensitizer needs to persist long enough for it to react with other compounds or materials. Numerous iron(II)-based complexes have been prepared for this purpose, but these suffer from short excited-state lifetimes that limit their solar-energy applications. On page 695, Chábera et al.1 report a strategy for realizing long-lived excited states in iron-based compounds. Notably, the direction in which electronic charge is transferred to form the excited state is the reverse of that seen in most previously reported iron complexes.

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Figure 1: Structure of a photoluminescent iron-containing complex.

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References

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  1. Felix N. Castellano is in the Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-8204, USA.,

    Felix N. Castellano

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  1. Felix N. Castellano
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Correspondence to Felix N. Castellano.

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Castellano, F. Making iron glow. Nature 543, 627–628 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/543627a

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