Paramagnetic NMR investigations of metal-organic complexes of soft donor ligands and the tetravalent actinides

NMR spectroscopy of metal-organic complexes of the f-element metal ions is often challenging due to additional chemical shifts and enhanced relaxation close to the paramagnetic metal center. These effects originate from electronic interactions between metal and ligand and often result in large additional NMR chemical shifts, compared to isostructural diamagnetic complexes, ob-served on the resonances of the ligands’ nuclei. The major two contributors to these paramag-netic chemical shifts are Fermi-contact shifts (FCS) and pseudo-contact shifts (PCS). FCS are due to delocalization of unpaired electron density in molecular orbitals involving both metal and ligand orbitals and thus report on the bond properties. PCS are originating from distance- and angle-dependent dipolar coupling of electron spins through space and are therefore bearing structural information.

The paramagnetic contributions can be mathematical separated provided that a suitable diamag-netic reference is available in order to subtract non-paramagnetic contributions. For the trivalent actinides no diamagnetic reference in the same series is available in milligram scale. Further-more, all available theories behind mathematical disentangling of contributions to the paramag-netic chemical shift, even for the lanthanide series, omit the influence of spin-orbit effects that might have a sizeable contribution as well. [1,2] Comparing studies of isostructural diamagnetic complexes of both f-element series of tetravalent metal ions (Ce(IV) and Th(IV)) allow for an es-timation of additional influences to the chemical shifts and the effect of contributions usually omitted by commonly used mathematical theories.

With Th(IV) as a diamagnetic reference in the same series, studying paramagnetic metal-organic complexes of the tetravalent actinides (An(IV)) allows to assess the chemical bonding situation via the influences on NMR chemical shifts (via FCS) and additionally allows to exploit the geo-metrical information which can be extracted from dipolar interactions (via PCS). These structural properties of the complexes as derived from PCS contributions can be compared to single crys-tal X-ray diffraction structures enabling a comparison of solution state and solid state structure of the metal-organic complexes under investigation. Herein we report the first results of investiga-tions of N- and N,O-donor ligand complexes of the An(IV) series (Th(IV), U(IV) and Np(IV)).