Nanoscale Associate Editor Professor Xiao Cheng Zeng‘s latest discovery has featured in Chemistry World this week. Zeng and colleagues have calculated the structure of a stable carbon dication with a coordination number of 7, higher than any yet seen experimentally.
Read the Chemistry World article:
Carbon clusters score lucky seven
US and Chinese chemists say that they’ve calculated the structure of a stable carbon dication that would have a higher coordination number than any yet seen experimentally. Xiao Cheng Zeng from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and colleagues have found that a carbon surrounded with seven titanium atoms can fulfil the necessary stability criteria. ‘We examined all first-row transition-metal elements and most main group elements,’ Zeng tells Chemistry World. ‘Only titanium fits thus far.’ Surrounding carbon with more than four other atoms moves beyond conventional two-centre, two-electron bonds to arrangements sharing fractional numbers of valence electrons. The current record largest cluster seen experimentally was a hexacoordinate carbon structure synthesised by Japanese researchers in 2008. But theoretical physical chemists are curious to see how much further coordination numbers might be pushed.
Professor Zeng handles submissions to Nanoscale in the computational and theoretical fields, he also has a specialist interest in nanoclusters, computational nanocatalysis and computer-aided design and study of nanostructured materials.
Submit to Xiao Cheng Zeng’s Editorial Office today.
