Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog
Author Henry Rzepa
Previously, I looked at the historic origins of the so-called π-complex theory of metal-alkene complexes. Here I follow this up with some data mining of the crystal structure database for such structures. Alkene-metal "π-complexes" have what might be called a representational problem; they do not happily fit into the standard Lewis model of using lines connecting atoms to represent electron pairs.