A variety of electrochemical techniques including cyclic voltammetry, 5,6 current scan polarography, 7 the a.c. impedance method, 8 scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM), [9][10][11][12][13][14] in situ total internal reflection, 15 and laser trapping of a single oil droplet 16 have been introduced in this field. These studies have shown that reaction mechanisms of ET at the O/W interface can be classified into two major categories: i.e., the ion-transfer (IT) mechanism and the ET mechanism. The former involves an IT process of the ionic product of a homogeneous ET in one phase (usually, the W phase). The well-known ferrocene (O)-hexacyanoferrate (W) system 5 has recently been found to come into the IT mechanism, where the ET occurs "homogeneously" in the W phase and the IT of ferricenium cation as the reaction product is responsible for the current flowing through the interface.17 A biomimetic ET system between ascorbate (W) and chloranil (O), first reported by Suzuki et al., 18 has also been shown to belong to the category of the IT mechanism. [19][20][21][22][23] In these ET systems that belong to the IT mechanism, redox species in the O phase do not seem to be very hydrophobic (usually, they have their partition coefficients into the O phase KD < 10 4 ), so that they may give rise to a homogeneous ET in the W phase, rather than a heterogeneous ET due to molecular collision at the O/W interface.On the other hand, a highly hydrophobic redox species can show a heterogeneous ET at an O/W interface. Such a "true" ET was first reported by Geblewicz and Schiffrin, 6 who used an extremely hydrophobic, lutetium diphthalocyanine complex as a redox species in 1,2-dichloroethane. They observed a welldefined voltammetric wave for a plausible, heterogeneous ET at the O/W interface. In subsequent studies, other hydrophobic organometallic compounds including tin diphthalocyanine 24 and iron and ruthenium tetraphenylporphyrins 25 were also claimed to show true ET's in the absence of possible IT. These experimental studies then stimulated theoretical studies on the kinetics of ET at O/W interfaces. [26][27][28][29][30][31][32] Then, the applicability of the theory by Marcus [26][27][28][29][30] has been tested by means of the a.c. impedance method 8 and SECM. 9-14 Although these kinetic studies generally supported the Marcus theory, it seems premature to accept the validity of the theory, because there is not very much data, and because heterogeneous ET's at O/W interfaces are often complicated by unwanted reactions, such as the above-mentioned homogeneous ET's, decomposition reactions with supporting electrolytes, interfacial adsorption of redox species, etc. 33 In this study, we focused on metal complexes of 5,10,15,20-tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) for redox species in the O phase. Since the TPP complexes are sufficiently hydrophobic, they were expected to give rise to a true ET at an O/W interface. Also, their redox potentials, in contrast to those of phthalocyanine metal complexes, 34 are very much dependent on the ce...