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11: Coordination Compound Bonding

  • Page ID
    487314
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    • 11.1: Crystal Field Theory
      Crystal field theory describes how orbital degeneracy is broken in the presence of ligands. It is based on the electrostatic interaction between negatively charged orbitals and negative point charges as ligands.
    • 11.2: Crystal Field Stabilization Energy
      A consequence of crystal field theory is that the distribution of electrons in the d orbitals may lead to net stabilization of some complexes depending on the specific ligand geometry and metal d-electron configuration. It is a simple matter to calculate this stabilization knowing the electron configuration and the crystal field splitting diagram.
    • 11.3: Crystal Field Splitting
      The magnitude of the crystal field splitting (Δ) dictates whether a complex with four, five, six, or seven d electrons is high spin or low spin, which affects its magnetic properties, structure, and reactivity. Large values of Δ (i.e., Δ > P) yield a low-spin complex, whereas small values of Δ (i.e., Δ < P) produce a high-spin complex.
    • 11.4: Ligand Field Theory
      Ligand field theory is an extension of crystal field theory which includes orbital overlap between ligand orbitals and the metal d orbitals. It allows us to explain the differences between strong field and weak field ligands.
    • 11.5: Metal-Metal Bonding
    • 11.6: Spectrochemical Series
    • 11.7: Colors of Coordination Compounds
      The color for a coordination complex can be predicted using the Crystal Field Theory (CFT). Knowing the color can have a number of useful applications, such as the creation of pigments for dyes in the textile industry. The tendency for coordination complexes to display such a wide array of colors is merely coincidental; their absorption energies happen to fall within range of the visible light spectrum.
    • 11.8: Magnetic Moments
      Magnetic moments are often used in conjunction with electronic spectra to gain information about the oxidation number and stereochemistry of the central metal ion in coordination complexes. A common laboratory procedure for the determination of the magnetic moment for a complex is the Gouy method which involves weighing a sample of the complex in the presence and absence of a magnetic field and observing the difference in weight. A template is provided for the calculations involved.


    11: Coordination Compound Bonding is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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