Monday, April 27, 2009

Lecture #12, Friday, April 24, 2009

We continued discussing orbital interactions in transition metal complexes. The octahedral complexes were compared to those in a tetrahedral environment and as the arrangement of the ligands changed a different splitting of the orbitals is observed. This has an impact on how the electrons can fill these orbitals. The greater overlap the ligands have with the transition metal d orbitals in an octahedron give a much larger energy difference and can lead to cases where we observe a low spin arrangement of the electrons. All tetrahedral complexes are high spin due to a small splitting of the d orbitals.

I also discussed degenerate orbitals and the abbreviations we use to label them.

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