John H. Enemark Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-11-05
The study concerns metal nitrosyl complexes. Their metal-nitric-oxide bonding can make a simple oxidation-state assignment misleading, so a combined electron count groups related electronic structures without requiring electrons to be localized uniquely on one partner.
Metal nitrosyl complex 2026-11-05
A metal nitrosyl complex contains a coordinated nitric-oxide group, conventionally written M–NO. The metal–nitrogen–oxygen arrangement may be approximately linear or bent, and changes in geometry correlate with different bonding and reactivity.
Assigning every nitrosyl a single fixed formal charge can obscure the delocalized electronic structure. A useful counting approach groups the metal and nitrosyl together and counts the relevant electrons of that fragment. Geometry, spectroscopy and electron count then constrain one another. The original 1974 treatment explicitly relates these structural alternatives to chemical reactions.[ref]
Robert D. Feltham 2026-11-05
The study concerns metal nitrosyl complexes, where assigning electrons separately to the metal and nitric-oxide ligand can be ambiguous. Counting the metal d electrons together with the nitric-oxide antibonding electrons provides a useful classification without pretending that every complex has one uniquely localized oxidation-state description.