Understanding covalency in actinide-element bonds is crucial to developing new ligand frameworks for separations that are relevant to the nuclear fuel cycle and the isolation of rare earth elements that are critical to the electronics industry. Metal-element multiple bonds are inherently more covalent, and uranium phosphinidene (U=PR) complexes offer the additional advantage of a 31P nucleus that can be probed spectroscopically to evaluate the electronic structure of the actinide center.  Here we describe our efforts to generate uranium phosphinidene species and evaluate their electronic structure and reactivity patterns as a means of probing covalency in the U=P bond.

Synthetic routes toward uranium phosphinidene complexes for probing actinide covalency

247th National Meeting (2014)

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