The chemistry of atomic transition-metal ions: insight into fundamental aspects of organometallic chemistry

TLDR: In this article, the authors limit themselves to those methods in which motion along the reaction coordinate is the key dynamic variable that can be controlled as reactants approach and measured as the products recede.

Abstract: For species as simple as atomic transition-metal ions, organometallic transformations usually involve multistep processes. These transformations have been studied with the entire arsenal of experimental techniques developed for the study of ion-molecule chemistry: conventional tandem mass spectrometry, flowing afterglow (FA) techniques, and ion cyclotron resonance (ICR) mass spectrometry and its Fourier transform adaptation (FT-ICR). In this Account, the authors limit ourselves to those methods in which motion along the reaction coordinate is the key dynamic variable that can be controlled as reactants approach and measured as the products recede. In our laboratories, guided ion beam techniques have been developed and highly refined for studies of the variation of reaction probabilities with E{sub T}. Complementing this work are measurements of product kinetic energy release distributions (KERDs).