RESUMEN
Curcumin has chemopreventative properties against a variety of tumours, but has poor bioavailability. Here, two new bis-cyclometallated iridium(III) complexes have been prepared, featuring the natural product curcumin (CUR) or its reduced form, tetrahydrocurcumin (THC), as bidentate, anionic O O-binding ligands. The iridium THC complex is highly luminescent in deoxygenated solution and efficiently generates singlet oxygen under aerated conditions, whereas in the CUR analogue, other non-radiative decay pathways are competitive. The complexes are rapidly taken up by a variety of human tumour cell lines from solutions of micromolar concentration. They show negligible cytotoxicity in the absence of irradiation. When briefly irradiated with visible light, Ir-THC becomes highly phototoxic, inducing rapid apoptosis within 2â h. The results show the high potential of such complexes as sensitizers in photodynamic therapy (PDT).
RESUMEN
Five new platinum(ii) complexes bearing a cyclometallated 5-π-delocalized donor-1,3-di(2-pyridyl)benzene were prepared and fully characterized. Their second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties were determined by the Electric-Field Induced Second Harmonic generation (EFISH) technique, working in DMF solution with an incident wavelength of 1907 nm, whereas the dipole moments were determined by Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations. Remarkably, the platinum(ii) complex with a cyclometallated 5-guaiazulene-CH[double bond, length as m-dash]CH-1,3-di(2-pyridyl)benzene appears as a very good candidate for application in photonics, being characterized by the largest second-order NLO response. Besides, it appeared that the nature of substituents on thiophene, chosen as π-delocalized moiety in position 5 of the 1,3-di(2-pyridyl)benzene, strongly affects the NLO properties.
RESUMEN
High-efficiency pure blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) remain one of the grand challenges, principally because the emissive complexes employed either do not possess sufficiently high photoluminescence quantum yields or exhibit unsatisfactory Commission International de l'Éclairage (CIE) coordinates. Here two deep-blue-emitting homoleptic iridium(III) complexes are reported and OLEDs are demonstrated with CIE coordinates of (0.15, 0.05) and maximum external quantum efficiency of 13.4%, which decreases slightly to 12.5% at 100 cd m-2 . They represent examples of the most efficient OLEDs surpassing the CIEy requirement of the National Television System Committee (NTSC) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Emitter orientation contributes to the excellent device performance.