| Carbon monoxide (CO) and small olefins represent perhaps the simplest, but most important ligand systems in coordination/organometallic chemistry. Simple carbonyl and ethylene compounds have started to appear in the field since the early nineteen century. Due to their peculiar electronic properties, strong bonds to late transition metal cations such as CuI, AgI, and AuI are generally discouraged. However, intermediates involving M-CO or M-olefin (where M = CuI, Ag I, AuI) have been claimed to be key-steps in reactions and industrial processes involving coinage metals. Unfortunately, experimental data on coinage metal complexes with CO and olefins are scarce due to the difficulty of isolating such adducts. In this work several novel metal carbonyl and olefin compounds will be presented, which make a precious addition to the coinage metal chemical 'landscape'. Their syntheses will be presented and their principal characteristics discussed on the basis of spectroscopic data and metric parameters derived from X-ray diffraction; furthermore, their electronic structures, obtained by density functional theory (DFT), will be studied in detail. |
