This problem set was designed to be an in-class activity for students to practice applying their knowledge of metal-metal bonding (as discussed in the previous lecture) to recently published complexes in the literature. In this activity, complexes from four papers by Christine M. Thomas and coworkers are examined to give students practice in electron counting (CBC method), drawing molecular orbitals, and fundamental organometallic reactions.

This LO is a problem-set-style literature discussion that leads students through a critical analysis of an interesting but flawed paper from the recent chemical literature.  Students use the questions to help them work through the paper prior to class, providing plenty of raw material for an in-class discussion about various aspects of the work from a mechanistic organometallic perspective.  The questions help students critically analyze substrate tables, spectroscopic data, and computational results from DFT.

This set of questions is intended to guide students through an excellent article by Jeff Byers and co-workers that describes the us

This is a literature assignment for a junior/senior level course. Guiding questions are provided to assist students with reading the article so that they see the value and importance of developing catalysts for polymerization reactions. This assignment is based upon the article 

This literature discussion is based on a short paper describing a series of Group VI metal carbonyl compounds that have pincer ligands (Organometallics, 2016

Literature discussion about the first examples of molecular hydrogen complexes isolated by Gregory J. Kubas in the early 80s. The questions are divided into groups with two levels of difficulty.

The more basic group of questions includes topics on:

1)      Coordination Chemistry: electron count, geometry, oxidation state, orbital interactions, types of ligands, binding modes, cis/trans and fac/mer isomers.

2)      Symmetry elements and point groups.

3)      Basic concepts on spectroscopy: NMR, Raman, IR, UV/Vis, XANES, EXAFS, neutron and X-ray diffraction

This is a literature discussion based on a short paper on ethylene compounds of the coinage metals (Dias, H. V. R.; Wu, J. Organometallics 2012, 31, 1511-1517). In this paper, analogous ethylene compounds are prepared with Cu(I), Ag(I) and Au(I). The other ligand on the coinage metal is a scorpionate tris(pyrazolyl)borate ligand. The strength of the interaction between the metal and the ethylene varies significantly with the coinage metal as seen in X-ray crystallographic and spectroscopic (¹H and ¹³C NMR) data.