This literature discussion was prepared as part of the 2025 ACS awards collection in honor of Gary J. Schrobilgen, winner of the M. Frederick Hawthorne Award in Main Group Inorganic Chemistry.
This literature discussion introduces students to various tetradentate ligands not commonly seen in textbooks. Students can apply knowledge of ligand binding to predict coordination geometry while exploring how the 3D nature of more complex ligands can affect their coordination to a metal.
This LO was developed as a review activity for the end of the semester. Students are required to touch on a wide range of topics including acid-base theories, crystal systems, point groups, the spectrochemical series, and 19F NMR spectroscopy. A close reading of the paper is required helping to build student comprehension of the literature.
This activity was designed to assess student comprehension of how changes in pi-donation from ligands can affect both crystal field splitting and metal spin states. The activity requires students to practice electron counting, idealized crystal field splitting, and then apply these concepts to explain the observed change from low to high spin caused by the loss of a proton.
This discussion is intended as a brief application of symmetry and ligand coordination to a novel Zr compound. Students apply VSEPR and molecular symmetry to an uncommon organometallic compound, and apply the coordination mode to basic reactivity. It is intended for an in-class activity but could easily be assigned as a short homework assignment.
This is a literature discussion focused on calculating and comparing the Mulliken electronegativites of the noble gases. Students can explore how this periodic property extends into the noble gases and impacts the observed reactivity of Group 18 compounds. The discussion could be used either as an in-class activity or a homework assignment.
This Literature Discussion considers the synthesis of the first carbene-bismuthinidene complex by Gilliard and coworkers in 2019. This molecule serves as an illustration of different bonding models, as it can be described by multiple resonance structures invoking fully covalent, zwitterionic, and coordinate/dative bonding forms. Students analyze these resonance structures and their geometrical implications, then compare to the experimental structural evidence to come to a conclusion about which bonding model(s) best describe this molecule!
This is a literature-based end of semester project. After a semester of introducing literature in the form of typical literature discussions, this assignment is given to small groups. It may be easily amended or added to. Each group is provided with a paper and accompanying questions that are similar to the literature discussions they have done over the semester. They then must use these guiding questions to assemble a presentation to the class. The topics chosen and the guiding questions are designed to provide students with a taste of the many areas of inorganic chemistry that are no
This article focuses on a theoretical analysis of K-edge X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) of Fe(CO)5 in the D3h and C4v geometries. For the context of a one semester inorganic chemistry / physical inorganic chemistry course, the authors use computational methods and experimental X-ray techniques to generate the XANES spectra of two different geometries of Fe(CO)5. Densities of states are used to show overlap between specific orbitals (Fe p with C p), indicating pi-backbonding.
Frank Neese was honored with the 2024 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry for outstanding accomplishments in combining high-level theory with experiment to obtain insight into the properties and reactivities of transition-metal complexes and metalloenzymes.
His major contributions to the field have been through the development and dissemination of his free computational modeling software program ORCA, which is used by thousands of researchers across the fields of inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry.