ABSTRACT
Polymers that contain transition metal complexes either directly or indirectly attached to a p-conjugated backbone are an exciting class of modern materials. This chapter discusses Type I, Type II, and Type III conjugated metallopolymers incorporating more heavily studied late-transition metals and lanthanides, focusing on the photophysical properties. Nonvolatile memory devices, in which information is stored without an applied voltage, are useful due to their low power consumption. In the late 1990s our group began investigating Ru(II) bis(acetylide) complexes with pendant redox groups in an effort to model the electronic behavior of Type III conjugated polymers containing the same Ru(II) groups. Conjugated bridges between Fe(II) metal centers to give Type III polymers have been investigated for their spin-crossover behavior. Incorporation of transition metal centers into conjugated polymers may provide a route to more efficient light-emitting devices based on the materials, as the metal can facilitate spin-orbit coupling to populate triplet states allowing both singlet and triplets to be harvested.
