Metallacumulenes as potential electron reservoir devices

This paper reviews recent work in the area of organomanganese chemistry whose purpose is the design of single-molecule components for electronics. This field has recently received much attention in the pursuit of continued miniaturization of electronics. Electron reservoirs and molecular wires are basic motifs of single-electron devices. Both can accept and release electrons in a reversible fashion, but the former can also store electrons. Our recent work in the field deals with complexes of two distinct types: mononuclear half-sandwich manganese(I) vinylidene complexes, designed for application as electron reservoirs, and half-sandwich dinuclear manganese complexes and the bis-dmpe dinuclear Mn^II/Mn^II compounds, which were designed to serve as molecular wires. However, this review will focus on the mononuclear half-sandwich manganese(I) vinylidene and butatrienylidene systems, which have been synthetically successful systems and are supported by extensive DFT calculations and further detailed investigations using NMR, IR, UV - vis, and Raman spectroscopy, CV, magnetic susceptibilities, and X-ray diffraction studies.