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The Chemical Bond I pp 89–129Cite as

Lewis Description of Bonding in Transition Metal Complexes

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Part of the book series: Structure and Bonding ((STRUCTURE,volume 169))

Abstract

Transition metal complexes have been playing an increasingly important role in modern chemistry in the past century, and this is partly due to their distinctive structure and bonding features that allow them to play a special role in organometallic reactions. Despite their importance, the current understanding of their structure and bonding relies to a large extent on sophisticated quantum chemical treatments, which do not encourage the formulation of more generalized rules. In this review, commemorating the centennial anniversary of the seminal Lewis paper, we would like to go back to basics and start from the classical Lewis description and then combine some observations we obtain from modern molecular orbital theory to give a simple but general bonding picture for transition metal complexes. This model, albeit simple, provides a localized description to metal–ligand interactions in these complexes and allows us to easily treat various cases with atypical metal–ligand or even metal–metal interactions in a modular manner.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Grant No. GRF16303014 and CUHK7/CRF/12G). F.K.S. acknowledges support from the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme 2012/13 (PF11-08816).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Fu Kit Sheong, Wen-Jie Chen & Zhenyang Lin

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  1. Fu Kit Sheong
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  2. Wen-Jie Chen
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  3. Zhenyang Lin
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Correspondence to Zhenyang Lin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    D. Michael P. Mingos

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Sheong, F.K., Chen, WJ., Lin, Z. (2015). Lewis Description of Bonding in Transition Metal Complexes. In: Mingos, D. (eds) The Chemical Bond I. Structure and Bonding, vol 169. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/430_2015_182

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