Organometallic actinide complexes with novel oxidation states and ligand types

This chapter describes advancements in organometallic actinide chemistry from 2006 to 2015. This cut-off was chosen because (1) 10 years is a pleasingly round number and (2) 2006 is the publication year of the Chemistry of the Actinides and Transactinide Elements, 3rd edition. In order to get an overview of the scope of actinide organometallic and coordination chemistry, it explores the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). The chapter also discusses aspects of covalency, and highlights experimental and computational techniques at the forefront of its evaluation. Chemists must be careful to make the distinction between energy-driven covalency and the more traditional overlap-driven covalency; experimental and theoretical studies show that for actinide-ligand bonds. Both types of covalency may be operative for different classes of complexes depending on the oxidation state and nature of the ligand. In the past 10 years, considerable progress has been made in the synthesis of actinide complexes with group 16 donor ligands.