Pearson acid base concept

R. G. Pearson, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 85 3533 (1963) T. L. Ho, Hard and Soft Acids and Bases in Organic Chemistry, Academic Press, New York, 1977 W. B. Jensen, The Lewis Acid-Base Concept, Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1980, Chapter 8. 

According to the acid-base concept of Pearson, A -phosphorins can be viewed as soft bases the lone electron pair at phosphoms is much more delocalized than the lone pair at nitrogen in pyridine. Thus, such soft Lewis acids as Hg ions are more likely to react with A -phosphorins (see p. 84). 

Pearson, R. G. (1972). [Quantitative evaluation of the HSAB (hard-soft acid-base) concept]. Reply to the paper by Drago and Kabler (1972). Inorg. Chem. 11, 3146. 

The above classification is generally in agreement with Pearson s acid-base concept. Protic solvents are hard in nature, and they solvate small anions with strong hydrogen bonds, whereas dipolar aprotic solvents have a soft character, and they interact more strongly with the large, polarizable anions. 

Under the same conditions, silver thiophenolate aflFords mostly 2-nitro-5-phenylthio-l,3,4-thiadiazole (160), together with minor amounts of (158) and (159). The observations indicate a dependence of the leaving-group potential upon the cation associated with the anionic nucleophile an interpretation has been proposed in terms of Pearson s acid-base concept. 

Lewis [5] was the first to describe acids and bases in terms of their electron accepting and electron donating properties. Mulliken [6] further refined the understanding of the acid base interactions for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His quantum mechanical approach introduced the concept of two contributions, an electrostatic and a covalent, to the total acid-base interaction. Pearson [7] introduced the concept of hard and soft acids and bases, the HSAB principle, based on the relative contributions from the covalent (soft) interaction and the electrostatic (hard) interaction. In his mathematical treatment he defined the absolute hardness of any acid or base in terms of its ionisation potential and electron affinity. Pearson s is probably the most robust approach, but the approaches in most common use are those developed by Gutmann [8] and Drago [9], who separately developed equations and methods to quantify the acid or basic strength of compounds, from which their heats of interaction could be calculated. 

Pearson s hard and soft acid-base concept (HSAB)... 

Drago and co-workers Introduced an empirical correlation to calculate the enthalpy of adduct formation of Lewis acids and bases ( 5). In 1971, he and his co-workers expanded the concept to a computer-fitted set of parameters that accurately correlated over 200 enthalpies of adduct formation ( ). These parameters were then used to predict over 1200 enthalpies of interaction. The parameters E and C are loosely Interpreted to relate to the degree of electrostatic and covalent nature of the Interaction between the acids and bases. This model was used to generalize the observations involved in the Pearson hard-soft acid-base model and render it more quantitatively accurate. 

The Lewis acid/base complex is formed via an overlap between a doubly occupied orbital of the donor D and vacant orbital of the acceptor A. This acid/base approach was extended by Pearson who divided Lewis acids and bases into two groups, hard and soft, according to their electronegativity and polarizability (principle of hard and soft acids and bases (HSAB concept). Hard acids (e.g., H, Lf, Na, BF3, AICI3, hydrogen-bond donors HX) and hard bases (e.g., F", CL, HO, RO, H2O, ROH, R2O,... 

Hardness and softness as chemical concepts were presaged in the literature as early as 1952, in a paper by Mulliken [138], but did not become widely used till they were popularized by Pearson in 1963 [139]. In the simplest terms, the hardness of a species, atom, ion or molecule, is a qualitative indication of how polarizable it is, i.e. how much its electron cloud is distorted in an electric field. The adjectives hard and soft were said to have been suggested by D.H. Busch [140], but they appear in Mulliken s paper [138], p. 819, where they characterize the response to spatial separation of the energy of acid-base complexes. The analogy with the conventional use of these words to denote resistance to deformation by mechanical force is clear, and independent extension, by more than one chemist, to the concept of electronic resistance, is no surprise. The hard/soft concept proved useful, particularly in rationalizing acid-base chemistry [141]. Thus a proton, which cannot be distorted in an electric field since it has no electron cloud (we ignore the possibility of nuclear distortion) is a very hard acid, and tends to react with hard bases. Examples of soft bases are those in which sulfur electron pairs provide the basicity, since sulfur is a big fluffy atom, and such bases tend to react with soft acids. Perhaps because it was originally qualitative, the hard-soft acid-base (HSAB) idea met with skepticism from at least one quarter Dewar (of semiempirical fame) dismissed it as a mystical distinction between different kinds of acids and bases [142]. For a brief review of Pearson s contributions to the concept, which has been extended beyond strict conventional acid-base reactions, see [143],... 

In the 1963 Pearson introduced the concept of "hard and soft acids and bases" (HSAB) [1]. The root of the idea lies in the simple acid-base view of chemistry of Lewis and leads to the statement that "hard acids prefer to coordinate to hard bases and soft acids prefer to coordinate to soft bases". 

The qualitative concepts of hardness and softness were first introduced by Pearson [30-32,34], which later culminated in enunciation of the famous hard-soft acid-base principle. Quantification of these concepts had been in order and was accomplished within density functional theory by Parr and Pearson [52]. The energy stabilization due to soft-soft interaction can be expressed by rearranging Eq. (61) as [52] ... 

To rationalize observations such as these, Pearson presented the concept of hard and soft acids and bases (HSABs), designating polarizable acids and bases as soft and nonpolarizable acids and bases as hard. Much of the hard-soft distinction depends on polarizability, the degree to which a molecule or ion is distorted by interaction with other molecules or ions. Electrons in polarizable molecules can be attracted or repelled by charges on other molecules, forming slightly polar species that can then interact with the other molecules. The HSAB concept is a nseful gnide to explain acid-base chemistry and other chemical phenomena. Pearson stated, Hard acids prefer to bind to hard bases, and... 

Finally, it must be mentioned that acid-base interactions can also be analyzed in terms of Pearson s hard-soft acid-base (HSAB) principle [56,57]. At present, the application of this concept to solid-solid interactions and thus to adhesion is under investigation. 

The concept of hardness or softness in chemistry was introduced by Ralph G. Pearson [268-272] in connection with the study of generalized Lewis acid-base reactions... 

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