Metals Organometallic species

In the mid-1960s, Dessy and coworkers [12, 13] provided an extensive survey of the anodic and cathodic reactions of transition metal organometallic species, including binary (homoleptic) carbonyls, and this provided a stimulus for many later detailed studies. Whereas the electrochemistry of heteroleptic transition metal carbonyls is covered elsewhere in this volume, that of the binary carbonyls, which is covered here, provides paradigms for the electrochemistry of their substituted counterparts. A key aspect is the generation of reactive 17-electron or 19-electron intermediates that can play key roles in the electrocatalytic processes and electron-transfer catalysis of CO substitution by other ligands. 

In general, transition metal organometallic species that contain an sp carbon bearing a hydrogen atom P to the metal will rapidly eliminate the p-hydrogen to form an alkene and a metal hydride (Scheme 10.13). ... 

In these equations, the exact nature of the initiating and chain-carrying species can vary from essentially covalent for transition-metal organometallic species in... 

An anionic mechanism is proposed for those polymerizations initiated by alkali metal organometallic species, where there is good reason to assume that the... 

In these equations, the exact nature of the initiating and chain-carrying species can vary from essentially covalent for transition-metal organometallic species in coordination polymerization to ion pairs or free ions in ionic polymerizations, depending on the structure of the chain-carrying species, the counterion, the solvent, and the temperature. 

An anionic mechanism is proposed for those polymerizations initiated by alkali metal organometallic species, where there is good reason to assume that the metal is strongly electropositive relative to the carbon (or other) atom at the tip of the growing chain [21,143-151]. However, analogous to the discussion of the active species in cationic polymerization, a multiplicity of active species may be involved as propagating species in anionic polymerization as shown below [150]. In contrast to cationic polymerization, however, there is experimental evidence for the involvement of many of these species under certain experimental conditions [145,147,148]. 

The first ri -transition metal organometallic complexes 272 were made from Li(Mc4C4ESiMe3) (E = Si, Ge) and Cp HfC (98JA8245). Species 272 (E = Si) with trimethylphosphine forms the Hf-PMc3-adduct. 

Grignard reagents are a very important class of organometallic compounds. For their preparation an alkyl halide or aryl halide 5 is reacted with magnesium metal. The formation of the organometallic species takes place at the metal surface by transfer of an electron from magnesium to a halide molecule, an alkyl or aryl radical species 6 respectively is formed. Whether the intermediate radical species stays adsorbed at the metal surface (the A-modelf, or desorbs into solution (the D-model), still is in debate ... 

Although olefin metathesis had soon after its discovery attracted considerable interest in industrial chemistry, polymer chemistry and, due to the fact that transition metal carbene species are involved, organometallic chemistry, the reaction was hardly used in organic synthesis for many years. This situation changed when the first structurally defined and stable carbene complexes with high activity in olefin metathesis reactions were described in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A selection of precatalysts discovered in this period and representative applications are summarized in Table 1. 

The transmetallation reaction involves the transfer of the organic group from an organometallic species to a Pd(II) species and produces a trails Pd(II) species. Isomerization from the trans arrangement to a cis one is necessary prior to the reductive elimination step. Reductive elimination yields the coupled product and regenerates the transition metal catalyst. Because the reductive elimination is very fast, competing reactions leading to by-products are usually not observed. 

Weitz and co-workers extended gas phase TRIR investigations to the study of coordinatively unsaturated metal carbonyl species. Metal carbonyls are ideally suited for TRIR studies owing to their very strong IR chromophores. Indeed, initial TRIR work in solution, beginning in the early 1980s, focused on the photochemistry of metal carbonyls for just this reason. Since that time, instrumental advances have significantly broadened the scope of TRIR methods and as a result the excited state structure and photoreactivity of organometallic complexes in solution have been well studied from the microsecond to picosecond time scale. ... 

There are, of course, metal-containing dendrimers that belong to more than one of the above-mentioned categories. Examples are the heptametallic dendrimer made of a central Fe(Cp)(C6Me6)+ core and coated with 6 ferrocene moieties [ 12], and the heterometallic dendrimers made of an organic core, containing up to 6 Pt(IV)-based organometallic species in the branches, and coated with up to 12 ferrocene units [13]. 

Mixed-metal dendrimers containing up to 6 Pt(IV)-based organometallic species in the branches and 12 peripheral ferrocene units (8) have recently been synthesized and their electrochemical behavior investigated [13]. As in the previously discussed examples, multi-electron reversible oxidation processes, assigned to the equivalent, non-interacting ferrocene units, have been observed. The authors point out that cyclic voltammetry is a powerful tool to support the structure of the dendrimers containing ferrocene units. 

It is not our intention in this section to provide a comprehensive review of flash photolysis of organometallic species rather, we summarize some key experiments which establish the timescales of different types of reactions. Understandably, much more work has been done on the flash photolysis of metal carbonyls in solution than in the gas phase, and so we begin with solution experiments. 

Already a considerable number of transient organometallic species have been characterized by IR kinetic spectroscopy (see Table I). Like most other sporting techniques for structure determination, IR kinetic spectroscopy will not always provide a complete solution to every problem. What it can do is to provide more structural information, about metal carbonyl species at least, than conventional uv-visible flash photolysis. This structural information is obtained without loss of kinetic data, which can even be more precise than data from the corresponding uv-visible... 

The application of newer methods to studies of gas phase organometallic reactions will lead to the development of routine techniques for determination of the thermochemistry of organometallic species. The examples discussed above demonstrate that an analysis of kinetic energy release distributions for exothermic reactions yields accurate metal ligand bond dissociation energies. This can be extended to include neutrals as well as ions. For example, reaction 15 has been used to determine accurate bond dissociation energies for Co-H and C0-CH3 (57). 

To date, most of the photochemical data available for transition metal complexes comes from condensed phase studies (1). Recently, the primary photochemistry of a few model transition metal carbonyl complexes has been investigated in gas phase (5.). Studies to date indicate that there are many differences between the reactivity of organometallic species in gas phase (5.6) as conq>ared with matrix (7-10) or solution (11-17) environments. In most cases studied, photoexcitation of isolated transition metal... 

---