This book is an English translation of the textbook entitled Sakutai Kagaku: Yuki-Muki Fukugotai no Bunshi Kagaku (Coordination Chemistry: Molecular Science of Organic–Inorganic Complexes), published in Japanese by Sankyo Publishing, Tokyo in 2021. It was planned by the Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry (JSCC) because, at that time, there was no comprehensive textbook covering coordination compounds from the basic and theoretical aspects to modern interdisciplinary developed fields such as organometallic and catalytic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, porous coordination polymer science, rare earth metal materials, bioinorganic chemistry, and so on. This book is intended not only for advanced undergraduate students who have already learned the basic chemistry related to inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry, but also for graduate students and young researchers who are new to coordination chemistry.
Coordination chemistry is a long-established field of science, originating from Werner’s coordination theory in 1893 applied to the so-called ‘metal complexes’. Because metal complexes, in which inorganic metals are surrounded by various ligands including organic ones, are attractive compounds for both inorganic and organic chemists, the field of coordination chemistry has continued to develop, leading to fusion with a variety of disciplines since the second half of the 20th century. In particular, organometallic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry and, more recently, the chemistry of supramolecular metal complexes and metal–organic frameworks or porous coordination polymers formed by the assembly of metal centres have developed rapidly and continue to expand, creating new interdisciplinary fields with novel scientific principles and applications. Thus, modern coordination chemistry is recognised as an interdisciplinary molecular science that has evolved at the interface of inorganic and organic chemistry, as the ‘molecular science of organic–inorganic complexes’, which combines the numerous electronic states generated by inorganic metal centres and the diverse structures woven by organic materials, and has advantages with rational design strategies to develop new materials with unprecedented physical properties and reactivity that can be applied to a variety of purposes, including important global issues such as the efficient recycling of resources and the effective use of renewable energy.
This textbook deals primarily with transition metal complexes involving d and f orbitals. It is also essential to learn the basics of a very wide range of peripheral disciplines such as quantum chemistry, crystallography, macromolecular science, catalysis, supramolecular science, biochemistry and molecular biology. However, it is not easy for students to learn such a wide range of fundamental knowledge surrounding coordination chemistry in a short time. With this in mind, this book is designed to be easy to read for beginners and is structured in such a way that they can read in a step-by-step manner, with the basic chapters (Chapters 1‒3: introducing metal complexes, and their structures and electronic states; Chapters 4–7: their optical and magnetic properties, thermodynamic stability and ligand substitution reactions, and electron transfer reactions) forming the foundation of the book, and the advanced chapters (Chapters 8–13: organometallic complexes, theoretical chemistry, assembled metal complexes and their functions, catalytic reactions, rare earth complexes, and bio-related metal complexes) explaining some of the recent interdisciplinary developments in an easy-to-understand manner. In addition, symmetry and group theory (Appendix A) and the Hartree–Fock method (Appendix B) are explained in appendices at the end. This is because theoretical chemistry using the molecular orbital methods is an important tool for understanding all stages of the chemistry of metal complexes. In each chapter, episodes, topics, key points and important analytical methods related to the content are introduced by ‘Box’. Throughout the book, an effort has been made to provide concise and easy-to-understand explanations of important basic knowledge, even if it is not directly related to metal complexes. We hope that students will not only memorise knowledge, but also develop the ability to think independently based on the basic principles. When you have gained some confidence, please try the problems at the end of each chapter. Graduate and postgraduate students who are about to start their research projects using metal complexes are strongly advised to read the basic parts first, and also to keep this book with them throughout their research, reading it over and over again until the end, so that they can get a comprehensive view of the ever-evolving molecular-based organic–inorganic complexes and the ability to look into the future of the field. This is also the wish of the authors in writing this book. Of course, those who already have a certain amount of knowledge can read only the chapters that interest them.
In order to ensure the depth of the contents of this book from the introductory to the advanced stages, five co-authors have contributed to this book: Tomoaki Tanase (Chapters 1–3, Chapter 10, Sections 10.1‒2, and Chapter 11, Section 11.4), Yoichi Ishii (Chapter 8, and Chapter 11, Sections 11.1‒3), Takashi Kajiwara (Chapters 4 and 5, Chapter 10, Section 10.3, and Chapter 12), Yasutaka Kitagawa (Chapter 9, and Appendices A and B), and Tomohiko Inomata (Chapters 6, 7, and 13). The authors are experts in advanced research related to their respective contributions. Dr Takayuki Nakajima (Nara Women’s University), Dr Yasuyuki Ura (Nara Women’s University) and Dr Hajime Kameo (Osaka Prefecture University) read the manuscript during the writing process and provided valuable opinions and advice from a student’s perspective. We are also grateful to Dr Hideki Masuda (Nagoya Institute of Technology), Chairman of the Publication Committee of JSCC, for his invitation to publish the textbook and his subsequent support. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mr Isao Hideshima, President of Sankyo Publishing, who patiently and passionately supported us when our writing slowed down during the publication of the Japanese version of this book. Finally, all the authors are very grateful for the invaluable support of the Royal Society of Chemistry for cooperating in the publication of this book as a part of the Coordination Chemistry Fundamentals series, and would like to thank all the RSC staff who contributed to the preparation of the book. Once again, we would like to express our gratitude to all of them.
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