Nuclearity cluster properties

The premise of this review is that synthetic procedures for very mixed"-metal clusters are comparatively well understood, but that reactivity and physical properties are less well studied. Metal core transformations (modifications of a preexisting cluster) fall into both the synthesis and reactivity categories. A summary is presented here, but as they have been reviewed elsewhere (see Refs. 4, 107-109), the account below is necessarily brief. Section lI.E. 1. considers core transformations where the cluster core nuclearity is pre.served, whereas Section 11.E.2. summarizes reactions involving a change in core size. 

You JF, Snyder BS, Papaefthymiou GC, Holm RH. On the molecular/solid state boundary. A cyclic iron-sulfur cluster of nuclearity of eighteen synthesis, structure and properties. 

Cluster properties, mostly those that control electron transfer processes such as the redox potential in solution, are markedly dependent on their nuclearity. Therefore, clusters of the same metal may behave as electron donor or as electron acceptor, depending on their size. Pulse radiolysis associated with time-resolved optical absorption spectroscopy is used to generate isolated metal atoms and to observe transitorily the subsequent clusters of progressive nuclearity yielded by coalescence. Applied to silver clusters, the kinetic study of the competition of coalescence with reactions in the presence of added reactants of variable redox potential allows us to describe the autocatalytic processes of growth or corrosion of the clusters by electron transfer. The results provide the size dependence of the redox potential of some metal clusters. The influence of the environment (surfactant, ligand, or support) and the role of electron relay of metal clusters in electron transfer catalysis are discussed. 

Clusters with nuclearities 7 and 8 comprise some five types, of which few examples of each have been synthesized. Reactivity properties of these clusters are largely unexplored. 

I have found that the assumption that in atomic nuclei the nucleons are in large part aggregated into clusters arranged in closest packing leads to simple explanations of many properties of nuclei. Some aspects of the closest-packing theory of nuclear structure are presented in the following paragraphs.1... 

During recent decades a great amount of knowledge about the properties of atomic nuclei has been gathered. An extensive theory of nucleonic interactions and nuclear structure [liquid-drop theory (7), shell theory (2, 3), unified theory (4), cluster theory (5—7)] has been developed... 

The electronic, optical, and magnetic properties of metal clusters are of great current interest, but these properties have been little studied with very mixed -metal clusters. This is to some extent a reflection of the difficulty of preparing high-nuclearity examples many of these interesting properties become important upon increasing cluster size. The limited magnetic studies to date are... 

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