Mass spectrometers are used by almost all chemists and many researchers from neighboring disciplines such as physics, medicine, or biology as a powerful a- lytical tool. Its advantages are high sensitivity, speed, and almost no sample c- sumption. During the last two decades, mass spectrometry experienced a boom of new developments pushing its limits further and further at an increasing speed - just similar to the progress in NMR spectroscopy in the 1970s. However, a mass spectrometer does not only serve as a machine for solving complicated analytical problems, it evolved meanwhile to a...

General The making and breaking of carbon-metal bonds is fundamental to all the p- cesses of organometallic chemistry and moreover plays a significant role in - mogeneous as well as heterogeneous catalysis. This rather blunt statement - phasises the extent to which a proper understanding of the structure, energetics and reactivity of C-M bonds is at the core of the discipline. In order to accept it, a proper definition of the terms involved is required. Quite simply we define the metal-carbon bond in its broadest sense to embrace carbon linked to transiti- metals, lanthanides and actinides,...