I wanted my organometallic class to explore the bonding and spectroscopy of the Kubas dihydrogen complex without having to spend the time doing the entire literature discussion (which is really great and I have done it many times in the past) because I wanted to do it in only about 20-30 minutes in a 75 minute class period. Most of the questions come from the Kubas literature discussion, which I shortened. The IR and reduced mass calculations come from an LO I wrote about arene activation by Jones and Feher.
Here are 10 slides to introduce students to multiple bonds formed between transition metals and between transition metals and ligands. This can be adapted to general chemistry, as long as students have learned Lewis diagrams. This can also be extended to add more information on the nature of the multiple bonds for upper division use in inorganic and physical chemistry.
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.
This is a collection of LOs that I used to teach a junior-senior seminar course on organometallics during Fall 2023 at Harvey Mudd College. There were a total of 11 students in the course. Most of the students had taken one semester of both organic and physical chemistry, and about half had taken inorganic (none from me, though, as I was on sabbatical). I used the Stanley textbook hosted on this site (linked below).
This literature discussion on the Hot Paper communication in Chemistry, A European Journal; highlights the first examples of borepinium and borfluorenium cations whose optical properties can be tuned and also the very first reported example of thermochromism in these cationic species. R. J. Gilliard, Chem. Eur. J. 2019, 25, 12512. https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.201903348
Rigorous treatment of the chemistry of inorganic compounds, including structure, properties, and reactions, and their interpretation in terms of quantum chemistry, and solid state chemistry; analysis with modern instrumentation.
CHEM 4310 is an in-depth review of modern inorganic chemistry. Topics will include symmetry, acids and bases, reduction-oxidation reactions, periodic trends, coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, and material chemistry. The course will meet for three hours of lecture and three hours of laboratory per week.
Materials Chemistry will explore many of the fundamental relationships between a material’s chemical structure and the subsequent interesting and useful properties that result. In order for advances in electronic, magnetic, optical, and other niche applications to be made, an understanding of the structure-property relationship in these materials is crucial. This course will emphasize inorganic systems, and topics will include descriptions of various modern inorganic solid-s
This course will explore many of the fundamental principles of inorganic chemistry, with significant emphasis on group theory, molecular orbital theory, angular overlap theory, coordination chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and bio-inorganic chemistry. Specific topics will vary, but will generally include coverage of atomic structure, simple bonding theory, donor-acceptor chemistry, the crystalline solid state, coordination compounds and isomerism, electronic and infrared spectroscopy applied to inorganic complexes, substitution mechanisms, and catalysis.
This literature discussion focuses on a 2022 Nature Comm paper looking at the reasons behind the pyramidal structures of tri-coordinate f-element complexes. There is plenty to discuss in terms of bonding and coordination geometries in metal complexes, and the effects of pressure on coordination geometry.