Scientists report breakthrough in actinide metal-metal bonding

Scientists from The University of Manchester have managed to successfully make actinide metals form molecular actinide-actinide bonds for the first time, opening up a new field of scientific study in materials research. Reported in the journal Nature , a group of scientists from Manchester and Stuttgart universities have successfully prepared and characterised long-sought actinide-actinide bonding in an isolable compound. The majority of the Periodic Table is metals, so the field of metal-metal bonding is a vast area of research after nearly 180 years of investigations, with applications spanning understanding electronic structure, catalysis, chemistry at metal surfaces, magnetism, and bio-inorganic chemistry. Bulk materials can be difficult to study, so there is great interest in studying molecular compounds possessing metal-metal bonding, since such species can be more straightforwardly studied in detail and they constitute models that represent molecular fragments of bulk materials. Though metal-metal bonding is extremely well developed for transition metals and main group elements, which has served as the foundation of the above applications, it has remained virtually unknown for the actinide elements, with examples restricted to spectroscopically observed transients or fundamental diatomics in microscopic-scale trapping experiments. Furthermore, making predictions about elements in the relativistic regime at the foot of the Periodic Table is highly challenging. Thus, experimental realisation of actinide-actinide bonding in routinely isolable molecules has been one of the top targets of synthetic actinide chemistry for decades.