Metallocenes Cyclopentadienyl ligands

Metallocene (Section 14 14) A transition metal complex that bears a cyclopentadienyl ligand Metalloenzyme (Section 27 20) An enzyme in which a metal ion at the active site contributes in a chemically significant way to the catalytic activity... 

Metallocene (Section 14.14) A transition metal complex that bears a cyclopentadienyl ligand. 

Many other shapes are possible for complexes. The simplest are linear, with coordination number 2. An example is dimethylmercury(O), Hg(CI l,)2 (4), which is a toxic compound formed by bacterial action on aqueous solutions of I Ig ions. Coordination numbers as high as 12 are found for members of the / block, but they are rare in the d block. One interesting type of d-mctal compound in which there are 10 links between the ligands and the central metal ion is ferrocene, dicyciopentadi-enyliron(O), [Fe(C5H5)2] (5). Ferrocene is an aptly named sandwich compound, with the two planar cyclopentadienyl ligands the bread and the metal atom the filling. The formal name for a sandwich compound is a metallocene. 

Cyclopentadienyl ligands have become extremely important in catalysis for metal such as Ti, Zr, and Hf (Chapter 10) and in academic studies of related elements such as Ta. Ethylene polymerisation with the use of CpiTiCE (alkylated with aluminium alkyl compounds) has been known for many decades, but the intensive interest in derivatives of these compounds started in the early 1980 s following the discovery of MAO (methaluminoxane - see chapter 10) which boosted metallocene catalyst activities by several orders of magnitude. Commercial interest focussed on ethylene copolymers (LLDPE where more homogeneous comonomer incorporation resulted in greatly improved copolymer properties) and in enantiospecific polymerisations for propene, styrene, etc. 

Fig.5 Examples of simple metallocene structures a parallel sandwich, b multi-decker sandwich, c half-sandwich, d bent/tilted sandwich and e compounds with differently bonded cyclopentadienyl ligands...

The reactions of electrophilic substitution in metallocene structures of the type 3 (Sec. 1.1) are numerous and various [423 133]. The reaction capacity of coordinated cyclopentadienyl ligands in ferrocene 749 is especially studied in detail (3.197) [423-426,433]. It is significant that already in 1968 more than 300 such transformations had been reported [424], for example (3.197) ... 

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