Researchers in the UK have made the first two uranium–rhodium complexes and found their uranium–rhodium bonds to be among the shortest heterometallic uranium bonds ever reported.1
Source: © Royal Society of Chemistry The uranium–rhodium distances in these two complexes are among the shortest between f-elements and transition metals reported to date
Building on their recent success forming uranium complexes with nickel, palladium and platinum,2 Polly Arnold’s group at the University of Edinburgh used a carefully designed bidentate phosphinoaryloxide ligand (ArPO–) to create two distinct uranium–rhodium complexes: a tetrametallic dimer, [I2U(OArP)2RhI]2, and a monomeric complex with three phosphinoaryloxide ligands and a bridging iodide. Although the two uranium–rhodium bonds are of similar length (2.760Å in the dimeric complex and 2.763Å in the monomeric one), electrochemical studies show that the bond stabilities are very different.
Interested? The full story can be read in Chemistry World.
The original article can be read below and is free to access until 30th March 2017:
Uranium rhodium bonding in heterometallic complexes
J. A. Hlina, J. A. L. Wells, J. R. Pankhurst, Jason B. Love and P. L. Arnold
Dalton Trans., 2017, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C6DT04570G
