Extreme Confinement Stabilizes Undercoordinated Sites
Scientists at Ames National Laboratory discovered that confinement effects can be sufficient to reduce the effective coordination number of a metal in grafted organometallic complexes. They applied nuclear dipolar coupling measurements to study the temperature-dependent motions of rare earth amidinate complexes grafted to silica support materials. They observed that ligand dynamics could be hindered, and slowed down, in narrow-pore environments.