Kei Yanagisawa, a Program Pilot Student from the Laboratory of Advanced Materials Chemistry, Graduate School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, succeeded in reducing one coordinate in the synthesis of seven-coordinate lanthanide complexes with strong luminescence. This result was published in the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, Vol. 2015, p. 4769–4774, with Yanagisawa himself as the lead author.

This particular research not only successfully reduced the number of coordinates from its most common form of eight-coordinate lanthanide complexes, but it also demonstrated that the efficiency of luminescent quantum dots on seven-coordinate lanthanide complexes is 10 times higher than eight-coordinate lanthanide complexes. Such indication provides a new guideline for new molecular design in lanthanide complexes with strong luminescence and points for the potential development of a brand new luminescent material.