HgBrI: a possible tecton for NLO molecular materials?

Mixed mercury(ii) halogenides have been known for a long time as good NLO (non-linear optic) materials. The NLO properties are due to the halogen disposition in the solid state and the electron distribution among the bonds formed by soft elements. We investigated the possibility of using HgBrI as a asymmetric tecton in the preparation of noncentrosymmetric crystalline compounds, by exploiting the coordinating power of Hg(ii) toward N-donor ligands, and seven coordination complexes have been obtained. To unravel the nature of these complex systems we combined the data from different techniques: Raman spectroscopy, SC-XRD and Second Harmonic Generation, supported by a periodic DFT computational approach. In HgBrI crystalline products with low symmetry, the presence of substitutional disorder leads to a lack of the inversion center conferring NLO activity, which is absent in analogous complexes of Hg(ii) halogenides. These results indicate HgBrI as an interesting tecton to obtain metallorganic NLO materials.