OPTICAL STUDIES OF THE GENESIS OF LIGAND-FREE COBALT AND RHODIUM CLUSTERS - RELEVANCE TO OXIDE-BOUND AND POLYMER-BOUND COBALT AND RHODIUM CLUSTERS

The matrix aggregation reactions of cobalt and rhodium atoms to very small metal clusters are studied by optical spectroscopy in inert gas and methane supports by using a combination of metal concentration, matrix variation, temperature-dependent bulk, surface, and photodiffusion-nucleation, as well as cluster photofragmentation, techniques. Together with preliminary, spin-restricted, ground-state SCF-Xα-SW cluster molecular orbital calculations, the possibility of utilizing the electronic information derived from weakly perturbed, “ligand-free” metal clusters for characterizing the chemically extruded metal frameworks of discrete metal carbonyl cluster complexes bound to and perturbed by the anchoring sites of, for example, oxide, polymer, Iigand silica, and zeolite supports is contemplated. © 1979, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.