Gold(III) chemistry beyond ground-state – GOLD3STAR

Spectacular progress has been achieved recently in the organometallic chemistry of gold. Ligands have been shown to be of paramount importance to stabilize highly reactive gold complexes and unlock elementary transformations considered so far highly disfavoured, if not impossible at gold. However, very little is known so far about gold complexes outside their ground states, despite the fundamental interest and synthetic potential of such species. It is the point of this ANR project to address the following questions and to explore thereby new facets in Au(III) chemistry: (i) How to access square-planar Au(III) complexes in non ground-state structures and what about their structure and reactivity ? One-step further, how to distort Au(III) complexes out of their nominal square-planar geometry and what is the impact on their properties ? (ii) What about the excited states of Au(III) complexes ? How to access them, what about their fate with respect to both ionic and radical paths, what are the controlling factors and how to take advantage of these photo-induced processes in catalysis ?