A Survey of Inorganic Structures and Bonding

In this chapter, the descriptions of molecular structure will be primarily in terms of a valence bond approach, but the molecular orbital method will be discussed in Chapter 5. As we shall see, construction of molecular orbital diagrams for polyatomic species is simplified by making use of symmetry, which will also be discussed in Chapter 5. 

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Clearly specific to inorganic systems are hydrogen bonds that directly involve metal atoms, M-H A and D-H M, i.e. those in the Metal Domain. A survey of crystal structures has illustrated that M-H O hydrogen bonds appear to resemble C-H O hydrogen bonds, although the former are of course far less abundant. The extent to which such hydrogen bonds may be useful in crystal engineering is addressed in Section 6. 

There are a number of books and articles on general aspects of the coordination compounds of mercury annual surveys are published in Coordination Chemistry Reviews5 and the Annual Reports on the Progress of Chemistry, Section A (Inorganic Chemistry—Mercury).6 McAuliffe s book The Chemistry of Mercury covers the literature up to May 1975.7 The coordination chemistry of mercury(II) halides has been summarized by Dean, covering papers up to 1977.8 A review of dimercury(I) coordination compounds was published by Brodersen in 1981,9 and in the same year Grdeni6 reviewed bonding in the crystal structures of mercury compounds.10... 

In this section, we survey the various theories of bonding and electronic structure which will be invoked elsewhere in the book and which will be regularly encountered by any serious student of inorganic chemistry. As pointed out in Section 1.2, it must be stressed that no one theory is wholly adequate, and the inorganic chemist must have at least a passing knowledge of several. The all-purpose theory would probably... 

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