Soft-hard hybrid donors

FIG U RE 1.5 Structure of soft-hard hybrid donors used for intergroup separation of Ans(III) and Lns(III). 

It is common that hybrid donor ligands impart distinctive properties to transition metals. Among the more classic examples where such behavior has been suggested concerns Fryzuk s hard/soft ligands that feature anionic amido... 

This simple valence-bond rationale, involving a resonance hybrid of forms 1 and 2, appears to explain many of the physical data available for sulfoxide complexes. It appears that S-bonding does not involve such a major internal rearrangement of the molecule as one may initially expect and is almost certainly a result of the increased orbital diffuseness on passing from oxygen to sulfur. Thus with typical hard acids (see ref. 437), orbital overlap will be most favorable with the less diffuse donor orbital of oxygen. In the case of typical soft metals, this overlap is less favorable due to the orbital diffuseness of the soft acid, and so coordination via sulfur occurs, where the orbital diffuseness of the donor and acceptor are more evenly matched. 

Preliminary studies were carried out in order to justify, using the reactivity index machinery, the higher reactivity of Co(II) derivatives with respect to other M(II) transition metal complexes, in particular when M = Mn(II) or Fe(II). Several ab intio smdies of the ground state properties of M-N4 complexes can be found in literature, especially concerning the relative stability of the different spin states (for instance in the case of Fe(II) derivatives). Here we consider only the most stable spin state for each metal complex and analyse the effect of the metal on the reactivity indexes (i.e. hardness, softness and electrophilicity). As already mentioned, and contrary to all other calculations reported in this review, these computations were performed using the parametrized hybrid Becke three-parameter exchange correlation functional (B3LYP " ) and a smaller basis set. The same level of theory was used to compute the donor molecule, i.e. the anionic form of 2-mercaptoethanol. 

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