Recent advancements in multinuclear early transition metal catalysts for olefin polymerization through cooperative effects

The pursuit of high-performance polyolefin materials has been an objective for chemists. Recently, the development of multinuclear catalysts has significantly enabled the preparation of high-performance polyolefin materials. In this review, we mainly focus on the cooperative effects of multinuclear early transition metal catalysts and provide a comprehensive summary of the research progress in binuclear and multinuclear early transition metal catalysts over the past decade. Compared with the catalytic performance and polymer structure of these catalysts with mononuclear catalysts, we have found that various factors, such as steric hindrance effect, electronic effect, heteroatom effect, hydrogen bonding interaction, the distance between metal centers in multinuclear metal catalysts, and the use of additives, have distinctive and significant impacts on catalyst performance. These effects give rise to notable cooperative effects. This review offers crucial insights and serves as a valuable reference for shaping the future development directions of binuclear and multinuclear early transition metal catalysts.