Metal-organic nonlinear optical (NLO) materials combine the superior properties of both organic and inorganic components, but there are currently few practical applications. Professor Wu Qi's team from Wuhan Textile University and Professor Chen Ling's team from Beijing Normal University published their latest research findings in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (Impact Factor: 16.1). They designed and synthesized a new metal-organic complex, Zn(C5H4NO)2, in which they discovered an unconventional bidentate coordination mode of 4-hydroxypyridine. This material exhibits an extremely strong second-harmonic generation (SHG) effect, with an intensity that is the highest among all UV-transparent zinc-containing metal-organic compounds.
In this study, the synthesized Zn(C5H4NO)2 is a white powder, and its structure could not be determined using conventional single-crystal diffraction. Therefore, 3D-ED (also known as MicroED technology) was employed to solve the structure. ReadCrystal Biotechnology is honored to have provided the MicroED structural analysis service for this project.
