In general, compounds exhibit one-state aromaticity in either the ground or excited state according to the Hückel’s and Baird’s rules. Thus, species with two-state aromaticity in the lowest singlet and triplet states (termed as adaptive aromaticity) are rare. Understanding the underlying mechanism for achieving adaptive aromaticity is important to enrich this rare family. Here we carry out density functional theory (DFT) calculations to probe the origin of adaptive aromaticity in metallapyridiniums.

Metallaaromatics as a new class of organometallic compounds have attracted considerable attention in recent years. Metallaaromatic compounds where the number of fused rings forming the metalla-polycyclic skeleton exceeds seven have not been reported to date. Likewise, metallaaromatic compounds containing two transition-metal centres are rarely encountered in the literature. In this work two dicationic diosma-octacyclic complexes have successfully been synthesized and fully characterized.

Singlet fission has attracted extensive attention from experimentalists and theoreticians due to its ability to improve photovoltaic conversion efficiency. Still, designing singlet fission materials remains challenging. In this work, we explored the relationship between adaptive aromaticity and singlet fission potentials by computationally screening the adaptive aromatic species reported by our group.