A comparative study of the electrochemical and proton-reduction behaviour of diphosphine-dithiolate complexes [M 2 (CO) 4 (l-dppm){l-S(CH 2 ) n S}] (M 5 Fe, Ru; n 5 2, 3) -diphosphine)(l-dithiolate)]. Consequently a large number of diphosphine-bridged diiron-dithiolate complexes have been reported [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] but surprisingly little attention has been paid to their proton-reduction chemistry [27-32] even though some, for example [Fe 2 (CO) 4 (l-dppf)(l-pdt)] (dppf = 1,1 0 -bis(diphenylphosphino)ferrocene), have been shown to be efficient proton-reduction catalysts [29]. Similarly, given the large number of diiron complexes tested as proton-reduction catalysts, related diruthenium complexes have not been widely studied [53][54][55][56]. Herein we detail a comparative investigation of the electrochemistry and proton-reduction behaviour of diiron and diruthenium complexes [M 2 (CO) 4 (ldppm)(l-pdt)] [24,27,57] and [M 2 (CO) 4 (l-dppm)(l-edt)] [26,27,57] (Fig. 1).
ExperimentalComplexes 1-4 were prepared according to published methods [24,26,27,57] (see ESI for details). IR spectra were recorded on a Nicolet 6700 FT-IR spectrometer in a solution cell fitted with calcium fluoride plates, subtraction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article