General Introduction

Abstract

AbstractLight-induced electron and/or energy transfer are essential reactions for solar energy conversion, which is an urgent priority to achieve a sustainable society. In addition to the physicochemical research, synthetic chemistry for synthesizing various series of multifarious photofunctional compounds is contributable for understanding and controlling those processes. Hetero-multinuclear metal complexes should be one of the most interesting photofunctional compounds because they often show useful photophysical properties, photochemical behaviors, and photocatalytic abilities due to the efficient intramolecular excitation energy and/or electron transfer and the flexibility in the molecular design. This chapter overviews the backgrounds and analysis of the problems in the conventional synthetic methods for integrating different types of photofunctional metal complexes to form hetero-multinuclear complexes, and then explores new strategies for novel classes of multinuclear complexes.KeywordsPhotofunctional metal complexesMultinuclear complexesBridging ligandsBuilding block approachCoupling reactions