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.

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• The Transactinides. The C&EN site has some interesting background reading on Lr, Rf, Db, Sg, Bh/Hs, Mt and Ds and beyond. Check out recent reports of the nuclear synthesis of elements 113 and 115 (Nature, New Scientist, LLNL). The LLNL site includes a short movie of the reaction.
• 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. The book extract on mercury came from John Emsley's "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements". The space-filling diagram came from Nick Kim's Nearing Zero. The CdSe nanoparticles image came from an online article.
• Silver and Gold. 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. 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. Download the Group 10 handout ().
• Topic G: Precious Metal Catalysis. Download the topic handout (). The RSC have a good resource on methanol carbonylation. Find out more about olefin hydrogenation using Wilkinson's catalyst.
• 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. Have a look at the structures and electron counts of some clusters, from Oxford's Molecule of the Month. Try these practice electron-counting problems (). If you get stuck, why not buy this excellent book?
• Ruthenium and Osmium. Download the Group 8 handout (). The figures relating to olefin metathesis came from a C&EN article entitled "Olefin metathesis: big-deal reaction".
• Topic E: Quadruple Bonds. MO diagram and representations of the orbitals for metal-metal multiple bonds.
• Technetium and Rhenium. See an online periodic table coloured by number of isotopes (click on the button underneath the title to change to the appropriate display). WebElements has a number of representations of elemental abundances.
• Topic D: Nitrogen Fixation. 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. Also see a virtual representation of the nitrogenase structure.
• Topic C: Polyoxometallates. Several of the pictures in your handout came from an article in Chemistry Communications "Bringing inorganic chemistry to life". Also see Achim Muller's website (select "Specials" then "Structures in 3D").
• 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 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; "Chapter 23 The Rare Earth and Actinoid Elements" (). This provides some useful background reading on the lanthanides and actinides. Dr. Stephen Heyes (Oxford University) has extensive online lecture notes for the lanthanides and actinides that are well worth browsing. Download the f-orbitals handout () and some of the other figures (); 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.
• Topic A: Superconductivity. There is a vast amount of online information on superconductors. Start at Superconductors.org, or just try searching with Google (333,000 hits at last count). Nice movies of the Meissner effect in action can be downloaded from the University of Oslo. Some of the figures in the handout came from the HyperPhysics site.
• 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.