Extended phenothiazines: synthesis, photophysical and redox properties, and efficient photocatalytic oxidative coupling of amines

Herein we successfully developed a ring-fusion approach to extend the conjugation length of phenothiazines and synthesized a series of novel extended phenothiazines 1–5. The intriguing π-conjugation length-dependent photophysical and redox properties of 1–5, and their photocatalytic performance towards visible-light-driven oxidative coupling reactions of amines were systematically investigated. The results indicated that this series of extended phenothiazines exhibited continuous red shifts of light absorption with increasing numbers of fused rings. As compared with the conventional phenothiazine (PTZ), all the extended phenothiazines displayed reversible redox behavior and maintained a strong excited-state reduction potential as well. Consequently, 3, 4 and 5 with longer effective conjugation lengths could efficiently catalyze the oxidative coupling of amines to imines under visible-light irradiation; by comparison, the shorter 1, 2 and PTZ could only catalyze such reactions in the presence of UV light. Moreover, 3 showed superior catalytic performance which can result in better yields within a shorter reaction time, and in a broad substrate scope. Finally, a direct and efficient conversion of amines to imines under sunlight in an air atmosphere was successfully realized. We believe that our study including the new phenothiazine modification methodology and the newly developed extended phenothiazine-based photocatalysts will open up a new way to develop novel phenothiazine-based materials for optoelectronic and catalytic applications.