New insights in luminescent fluorinated transition metal compounds

This chapter aims to provide new insights about organometallic compounds having at least one organic ligand substituted with a fluorine atom. Actually, fluorine substitution is a powerful tool for tuning several properties of the complex, such as optical properties, thermal stability, aggregation at the solid state, charge injection, energy transfer, or interactions with the surrounding environment even in biological tissues. Moreover, fluorinated ligands own a peculiar reactivity opening new routes to molecular design of organometallic complexes. After a brief introduction about the photophysics of these systems, various examples of fluorinated complexes will be discussed, highlighting the key role of fluorination on properties of complexes. Attention is also focused on electroluminescent fluorinated lanthanide, iridium and platinum complexes, due to their application in optoelectronics, providing a spread overview on the state of the art in this research field.