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Conservation laws, radiative decay rates, and excited state localization in organometallic complexes with strong spin-orbit coupling

There is longstanding fundamental interest in 6-fold coordinated $d^6$ ($t_{2g}^6$) transition metal complexes such as [Ru(bpy)$_3$]$^{2+}$ and Ir(ppy)$_3$, particularly their phosphorescence. This interest has increased with the growing realisation that many of these complexes have potential uses in applications including photovoltaics, imaging, sensing, and light-emitting diodes. In order to design new complexes with properties tailored for specific applications a detailed understanding of the low-energy excited states, particularly the lowest energy triplet state, $T_1$, is required. Here we describe a model of pseudo-octahedral complexes based on a pseudo-angular momentum representation and show that the predictions of this model are in excellent agreement with experiment - even when the deviations from octahedral symmetry are large. This model gives a natural explanation of zero-field splitting of $T_1$ and of the relative radiative rates of the three sublevels in terms of the conservation of time-reversal parity and total angular momentum modulo two. We show that the broad parameter regime consistent with the experimental data implies significant localization of the excited state.