Lanthanide-Porphyrins and Lanthanide-Phthalocyanines: Development of Stable and Effective Infrared 4f-Emittive Compounds

This review is devoted to different synthetic approaches for obtaining lanthanide complexes with porphyrins and phthalocyanines, studying their structure and emission features. Lanthanide-tetrapyrroles can be core-coordinated or/and coordinated by additional binding sites in polytopic derivatives. It is noteworthy that the polytopic tetrapyrroles allow obtaining poly­heteronuclear compounds, which is quite interesting in terms of their particular 4f-sensitization mechanism. A general structural difference between core-coordinated lanthanide-porphyrins and lanthanide-phthalocyanines is the ability of the latter to easily form poly-decker compounds, which leads to interesting changes in photochemical processes including 4f-sensitization. The review also shows the main directions for the solution of the stability issue as well as different approaches for increasing the 4f-luminescence effectiveness.