Facile construction of lanthanide metallomacrocycles with the bridging imidazolate and triazolate ligands and their ring expansions

Four novel tri- or tetranuclear organolanthanide metallomacrocycles Cp2Ln(mu-Im)(THF)3 (Cp = C5H5, Ln = Yb (1), Er (2)], Cp2Dy(mu-Im)]4(THF)]3 x 2THF (3), and Cp'2Yb(mu-eta1:eta2-Tz)]4 x 2THF (Cp' = CH3C5H4) (4) have been synthesized through protolysis of Cp3Ln or Cp'3Yb with imidazole or triazole, indicating that both the bridge-ligand size and the lanthanide-ion radii can be applied in the modulation of the metallomacrocycles. Further investigations on the reactivity of complexes 1, 3, and 4 toward phenyl isocyanate reveal that PhNCO inserts readily into the simple bridge Ln-N bonds of 1 and 3 to yield the corresponding insertion products Cp2Ln(mu-eta1:eta2-OC(Im)NPh)]3 (Ln = Yb (5), Dy (6)) but cannot insert into the Ln-N bond with a mu-eta1:eta2-bonding mode in 4. The novel bridge ligand OC(Im)NPh] can expand the numbers of the ring members from 12 to 18 in 5 or 16 to 18 in 6. The number of metal atoms in the metallacycles with the ligand OC(Im)NPh] is independent of the lanthanide-ion size; both trinuclear lanthanide macrocycles are observed in 5 and 6. All of these new complexes have been characterized by elemental analysis and spectroscopic properties, and their structures have also been determined through X-ray single-crystal diffraction analysis.