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I saw Amanda Cook present this work (and another paper, Organometallics, 2022, 41, 997) at the Organometallics Gordon Conference in summer 2023 and while I was furiously taking notes, I knew that I wanted to teach this paper. The paper elucidates the mechanism of oxidative addition of tertiary silanes to palladium zero phosphine complexes.
There is so much good information in this paper, and I wrote a reading guide that covers ALL of it, from NMR satellites to van't Hoff plots to KIE to Hammett plots to VT NMR to initial rates and more. The Pd complexes are relatively straightforward, and the mechanism they study is "simply" the oxidative addition of a silane to a Pd(0) center, but the clarity of writing in this paper, and the completeness of the science was refreshing to read.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| reading guide in docx format | 23.63 KB |
| reading guide in pdf format | 122.15 KB |
Students will classify complexes using the CBC method
Students will learn how to interpret the following data, and explain how it can help scientists elucidate a reaction mechanism:
- temperature effects of equilibrium
- competition experiments
- primary kinetic isotope effects
- initial rate measurements
- Eyring plots
- van't Hoff plots
- Hammett plots
Students will see examples of the following phenomena and interpret their relevant spectroscopic data:
- sigma complexes
- dynamic exchange
- NMR satellites
- variable temperature NMR
I assigned this reading guide to students a week in advance of an in-class discussion of the paper. The discussion was wide ranging but generally went through the concepts outlined in the reading guide. I collected the guide after class, allowing students to make additions/corrections based on the class discussion.
Evaluation
The reading guide was graded for "completeness" rather than correctness.
In general, students were able to capture the relevant information from the paper with little problem. Some students misinterpreted the equilibrium data (the effect of temperature and whether the reaction was exo- or endothermic).