424/525 Course Materials

Course Materials

This page contains links to most of the material you have been provided with in class. In cases where the material was sourced from the web, the original links are provided; class versions are usually an abbreviated form. Notes presented in class are not reproduced here; if you have missed lectures, you will need to obtain these off a classmate.

Many of the files here are in pdf format (marked with ). Get Adobe Reader via the button below if your computer is not already so equipped.

• The Actinides. Compare the metallic radii of the actinides and lanthanides in this WebElements figure. Download the actinides handout (). Find out more about nuclear power in Canada.
• Cadmium and Mercury.
• Silver and Gold. Download the Group 11 handout (). Relativistic effects in heavy metal chemistry are typically treated in cursory fashion by textbooks, if at all. A reasonably accessible account can be found in a short review (LARGE ) by Pyykkö. The changes in covalent radii across the d-block are illustrated at WebElements. Find out more about the properties of gold.
• Topic H: Heavy Metals in Medicine. In 2006, this topic is NOT examinable. Download the topic handout (). There is a very good online account of the discovery of cisplatin. Strongly recommended background reading; it is an interesting topic from many perspectives. The main picture in your handout came from an article in Science, "Boon and Bane of Metal Ions in Medicine" (). This article also has good background reading on the use of lanthanides in MRI and briefly mentions technetium in radioimaging. The book extract you were given came from Lance Armstrong's autobiography "It's Not About the Bike".
• Palladium and Platinum.
• Topic G: Precious Metal Catalysis. Download the topic handout (). Find out more about Johnson Matthey's catalyst technologies.
• Rhodium and Iridium. Download the Group 9 handout ().
• Topic F: Transition Metal Carbonyl Cluster Chemistry. Download the topic handout (). Revise the 18-electron rule; note that we will be using the COVALENT (sometimes called the radical or neutral) electron counting method, NOT the ionic model. This page is from Rob Toreki's Organometallic Hypertextbook, which has short articles on other areas of organometallic chemistry that we've touched on during the course.
• Ruthenium and osmium. Download the Group 8 handout ().
• Topic E: M-M multiple bonding. Download the topic handout (). Also see an MO diagram and representations of the orbitals for metal-metal multiple bonds.
• Technetium and rhenium. Download the Group 7 handout (). WebElements has a number of representations of elemental abundances in the universe. The Wikipedia has good resources on technetium.
• Topic D: Nitrogen Fixation. Download the topic handout (). Various pictorial representations of the abundances of the elements in seawater can be viewed at WebElements. A short online article on nitrogenase is available from the Protein Data Bank.
• Topic C: Polyoxometallates. Several of the pictures in the topic handout () came from an article in Chemical Communications called "Bringing inorganic chemistry to life". Also see Achim Muller's website (select "Structures").
• Molybdenum and tungsten. Download the Group 6 handout (). Visualize the hcp/ccp/bcc lattices online; you will need the Chime plugin to interact with the structures. Right-click to change the display, left click to rotate, etc. The 8-page extract was from the book "Uncle Tungsten" by Oliver Sacks.
• Topic B: Metal Halide Clusters. Download the topic handout ().
• Niobium and tantalum. Download the Group 5 handout () and the table () of transition metal oxides and fluorides.
• Zirconium and hafnium. Download the Group 4 handout () and the figure (LARGE ) which compares nd vs. ns (i.e. core) orbitals. Alternative representations of enthalpy of atomization across the d-block are available from WebElements.
• The Lanthanides. A chapter from Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry by Rayner-Canham & Overton can be downloaded for free from the publisher's site; "The Rare Earth and Actinoid Elements" (). This provides some useful background reading on the lanthanides and actinides. Download a depiction of the f-orbitals () and the lanthanide handout (); also check out the Orbitron. See how the lanthanides are mined and processed at the Molycorp website. This site includes the "Lanthanide Lanthology" Parts 1 and 2 (both ). Learn more about term symbols, Hund's rules and Russell-Saunders coupling at the HyperPhysics site. If you'd like some background reading on term symbols, download these 3 pages (large ) from Housecroft & Sharp. Intraconfigurational f-f transitions (formally forbidden) are responsible for the (weak) colour of Ln(III) ions; check out the relative magnitude of the splittings due to electron-electron repulsion, spin-orbit coupling, and the external field (induced by the ligands) in this diagram for f² ions (). The second lanthanide handout is also available (). The solvent extraction diagram came from a DOE site about depleted uranium; for the purification of lanthanides, up to 60 of these columns are connected in a series.
• Topic A: Superconductivity. Download the topic handout (). There is a vast amount of online information on superconductors. Start at Superconductors.org, or just try searching with Google (>2 million hits at last count). Nice movies of the Meissner effect in action can be downloaded from the University of Oslo. Check out some nice online depictions of the perovskite and 1-2-3 superconductor structures. Some of the figures in the handout came from the excellent HyperPhysics site. Nobel prizewinners (in physics) for superconductivity: Onnes (supercooling, 1913), Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer ("BCS" theory, 1972), Josephson (1973, superconductors and tunnelling) Bednorz and Müller (ceramic SCs, 1987), Abrikosov, Ginzberg and Leggett (more theory, 2003).
• Struggling to draw those accursed polyhedra? Print out this drawing lesson () and get practising.
• Yttrium and lutetium. Download the Group 3 handout ().
• Chemical Data. Sheets handed out in class summarize the information available on ChemSoc's Visual Elements site. Chemical data for individual elements can be obtained by following the data link from the web page belonging to that element. For example, go to http://www.chemsoc.org/viselements/pages/pdf/yttrium.pdf for yttrium; change "yttrium" to the name of whatever element you are interested in.
• Periodic Table. Reproduced (though often inaccurately) in nearly all chemistry textbooks and many versions are available on the net. I recommend Mark Winter's scrupulously up-to-date Printable Periodic Table (); this is the PT you will be provided with in midterms and for the final exam.
• A printable summary () of the course information; this essentially just reproduces the website.