A research team led by Professor He Gang at the Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), has developed selenoviologen-appendant metallacycles with highly stable radical cations and long-lived charge separation states for electrochromism and photocatalysis.

This study is the first to realize the application of supramolecular complexes (SCCs) in electrochromic and highly efficient cross dehydrocoupling photocatalytic reactions 

It provides a new idea for the design and synthesis of new functionalized SCCs, and lays a solid foundation for the development of viologen cationic radical chemistry.

The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the research results were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, an authoritative international journal in the field of chemistry.