Resolving the Ultrafast Changes of Chemically Inequivalent Metal-Ligand Bonds in Photoexcited Molecular Complexes with Transient X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy

Abstract

Photoactive transition-metal complexes that incorporate heteroleptic ligands present a first coordination shell, which is asymmetric. Although it is generally expected that the metal-ligand bond lengths respond differently to photoexcitation, resolving these fine structural changes remains experimentally challenging, especially for flexible multidentate ligands. In this work, ultrafast X-ray absorption spectroscopy is employed to capture directly the asymmetric elongations of chemically inequivalent metal-ligand bonds in the photoexcited spin-switching Fe II complex [Fe II (tpen)] 2+ solvated in acetonitrile, where tpen denotes N,N,N′,N′-tetrakis(2-pyridylmethyl)-1,2-ethylenediamine. The possibility to correlate precisely the nature of the donor/acceptor coordinating atoms to specific photoinduced structural changes within a binding motif will provide advanced diagnostics for optimizing numerous photoactive chemical and biological building blocks.