Nature Chemistry, Published online: 25 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41557-026-02259-7Access to long-lived light-induced states in earth-abundant transition-metal chromophores is desirable but hard to achieve. Now, enhanced metal–ligand covalency has been shown to increase the lifetime of the photomagnetic high-spin state in a manganese photoswitch.

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 29 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41557-026-02193-8Light-induced excited spin state trapping (LIESST) has largely been limited to iron complexes and typically requires cryogenic temperatures or large nuclear rearrangements, limiting practical photomagnetic switching. Now a carbene manganese(II) complex achieves LIESST at 141 K in solution, demonstrating that increased metal–ligand covalency and rigidity can stabilize long-lived high-spin states and extend photomagnetic switching towards more practical temperature regimes.

Homochiral Cu(I) cyanide complexes based on 2,2’-bis(diphenylphosphino)-1,1’-binaphthyl (BINAP) form melt-quenched and desolvation-derived metal–organic glasses that exhibit circularly polarized ther...

Ultrafast broadband transient absorption spectroscopy and multireference excited-state nonadiabatic calculations in an open-shell Fe(III) complex unveil the rich electronic and vibrational dynamics d...

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Transition metal complexes featuring ligand-to-metal charge transfer (LMCT) excited states have been identified as promising candidates for driving electron transfer processes. To obtain an efficient ...

Transition-metal complexes featuring metal-centered excited states have recently emerged as mechanistically distinct platforms for selective photochemistry, including photoredox catalysis. Among these...

Katja Heinze and Robert Naumann, Mainz, synthesized a series of chromium(III) chromophores with identical optical properties but systematically tunable redox behavior to study photoredox mechanisms

Die Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) schließt sich dem gemeinsamen Aufruf der Deutschen Meteorologischen Gesellschaft (DMG) und der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (DPG) an. „Globale Erwär...

Pairing manganese with an off-the-shelf ligand yields a low-cost complex that mimics precious-metal photocatalysts

A biomimetic model for the cysteine dioxygenase (CDO) was found to be also capable of selectively dioxygenating selenocysteamine, suggesting that the lack of reactivity found for the CDO in combinati....

Nature Chemistry - Chemical energy conversion and storage rely on the selective movement of protons and electrons, thus understanding these processes is important for applications. Now experiments...

Ruthenium and iridium are key components in the most important applications of photoactive complexes, namely, light-emitting devices, photocatalysis, bioimaging, biosensing, and photodynamic therapy. ...

Triplet–triplet annihilation photon upconversion (TTA-UC) provides a milder alternative to traditional UVB/UVC photochemistry. However, suitable sensitizer-annihilator pairs are scarce, in particular…

The response of a solvation shell to molecular solute photoexcitation is an ubiquitous phenomenon of great relevance in chemistry. This response can occur within just few tens of femtoseconds, making ...