Uranium(III) complexes with bulky aryloxide ligands featuring metal-arene interactions and their reactivity toward nitrous oxide.

We report the synthesis and use of an easy-to-prepare, bulky, and robust aryloxide ligand starting from inexpensive precursor materials. Based on this aryloxide ligand, two reactive, coordinatively unsaturated U(III) complexes were prepared that are masked by a metal-arene interaction via δ-backbonding. Depending on solvent and uranium starting material, both a tetrahydrofuran (THF)-bound and Lewis-base-free U(III) precursor can easily be prepared on the multigram scale. The reaction of these trivalent uranium species with nitrous oxide, N2O, was studied and an X-ray diffraction (XRD) study on single crystals of the product revealed the formation of a five-coordinate U(V) oxo complex with two different molecular geometries, namely, square pyramidal and trigonal bipyramidal.