6.02 | The Octahedral Ligand Field and Molecular Orientation Part 2

Monday June 27th 2022 | This lesson is a continuation of last week’s lesson on the MO-Diagram of Octahedral metal complexes. Today we will continue the lesson starting from the MO-diagram of a hypothetical Octahedral Complex with sigma-only interactions. After deducing the relevant frontier orbitals, we will see how the energy arrangement is affect by introducing either pi-accepting or pi-donating orbitals. Based on these additional interaction we are able to explain the spectrochemical series and understand the difference in high-spin and low-spin metal complex based on the changes in the ligand field. Finally, as the last part of this lecture, we take a look at the “oxo-wall” and how we can explain this phenomena with molecular orbital theory.

The link to the video can be found below