HSAB theory

The HSAB concept is an initialism for "hard and soft (Lewis) acids and bases". Also known as the Pearson acid base concept, HSAB is widely used in chemistry for explaining stability of compounds, reaction mechanisms and pathways. It assigns the terms 'hard' or 'soft', and 'acid' or 'base' to chemical species. 'Hard' applies to species which are small, have high charge states (the charge criterion applies mainly to acids, to a lesser extent to bases), and are weakly polarizable. 'Soft' applies to species which are big, have low charge states and are strongly polarizable. The concept is a way of applying the notion of orbital overlap to specific chemical cases.

The theory is used in contexts where a qualitative, rather than quantitative, description would help in understanding the predominant factors which drive chemical properties and reactions. This is especially so in transition metal chemistry, where numerous experiments have been done to determine the relative ordering of ligands and transition metal ions in terms of their hardness and softness.

HSAB theory is also useful in predicting the products of metathesis reactions. In 2005 it was shown that even the sensitivity and performance of explosive materials can be explained on basis of HSAB theory.

Ralph Pearson introduced the HSAB principle in the early 1960s as an attempt to unify inorganic and organic reaction chemistry.

The gist of this theory is that soft acids react faster and form stronger bonds with soft bases, whereas hard acids react faster and form stronger bonds with hard bases, all other factors being equal. The classification in the original work was mostly based on equilibrium constants for reaction of two Lewis bases competing for a Lewis acid.

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