Investigation of photoreaction pathways of gold halide series

Metal–ligand interaction is one of the major factors determining the chemical properties of inorganic and organometallic complexes. It is natural to expect that a series of metal complexes having the same metal center but different ligands would show different reactivities and reaction pathways. Such a dependency of the reactivities on the identity of the ligand allows room for the design and control of the reaction. For this purpose, it is necessary to understand the detailed molecular mechanism of how the M–L interaction affects the reactivities and reaction pathways. In this proposal, we propose to visualize the structural change of [AuX2−]n (X = Br or I) in acetonitrile during the photoreaction pathways. We will investigate the photoreaction pathways of analogous systems having heavier ligands of which the position can be sensitively traced via TRXL. By doing so, we seek to obtain direct clues for understanding how the M–L interaction affects the photoreaction pathways.