Light-driven expulsion of the sterically hindering ligand L in tris-diimine ruthenium(II) complexes of the Ru(phen)2(L)2+ family: a pronounced ring effect.

Three new ruthenium(II) complexes have been prepared which contain two 1,10-phenanthroline units and a third sterically hindering chelate. In one case, the hindering ligand is a disubstituted 2,2'-bipyridine (bpy) attached to two very bulky manisyl groups. The two other systems are similar in terms of size of the hindering groups (anisyl substituents) located close to the central metal. The complexes investigated in the Present Report are aimed at providing building blocks of future light-driven molecular machines. The photochemical expulsion of the sterically hindering chelate has thus been studied by UV-vis spectroscopy and 1H NMR. Surprisingly, the manisyl-containing complex turned out to be photochemically inert, indicating that a too bulky group acts as a protecting function versus decomplexation rather than as a destabilizing group. For the two other systems, a pronounced ring effect was observed: whereas the acyclic systems undergo fast photochemical expulsion of the bipy-based ligand, in the cyclic complex, the bipy-incorporating ring is decoordinated about 5 times less efficiently than the acyclic ligand of the previous case. These observations on the strong dependence of the photochemical behavior of the ruthenium(II) complexes on their structural properties are corroborated by X-ray diffraction studies on the three compounds investigated.