Formal Properties of Stereoisomerizations of Pentacoordinate Complexes. I. General Ligand Partition

Trigonal bipyramidal complexes may undergo rearrangements without bondbreaking. We propose in this paper a model which describes the kinetic behaviour of the most general ligand partition [where all ligands are different) of the trigonal bipyramid. It unables us to derive the multiplication table of the rearrangement mode operators and to diagonalize them by the same linear transformation. Relaxation times and time evolutions are calculated for the five possible isomerization modes.