Initial employment of alpha-benzoin oxime as a route to high-nuclearity metal clusters: decanuclear CuII complexes with a wheel topology.

The initial employment of alpha-benzoin oxime (bzoxH2) in metal cluster chemistry has provided access to a new family of decanuclear CuII complexes with a loop or single-strand wheel topology; the CuII10 clusters are antiferromagnetically-coupled with an S=0 spin ground state, as expected for even-membered loop arrays of CuII atoms.