Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 15 August 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1042
News
Photo finish for shortest metal-metal bond
In the ångström Olympics, competition for the chromium medal is fierce.
When in March this year Rhett Kempe submitted a paper for publication that reported the shortest ever bond between two atoms of metal in a stable molecule, he was confident of taking the record. In the compound made by Kempe and Awal Noor at Bayreuth University in Germany, and Frank Wagner from the Max Planck Institute for the Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany, there were two chromium atoms separated by a teeny 1.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
I read these recent papers of short Cr-Cr bonds with great interest even though Michelle Millar and I have not worked in the area since we were postdocs with F.A. Cotton in 1976-77. Al Cotton was extremely excited when Michelle made the first compound with a very short Cr-Cr bond. He had the communication written before, I had finished the crystallographic refinement. As we mentioned in our original papers and was alluded to in the Kempe and Wagner paper, the compounds that held the 30 year record for the shortest distance between any metal atoms, had actually been previously prepared by the great German synthetic chemist Franz Hein starting in the late 1950?s. If Hein had access to X-ray crystallography, the first characterized example of a compound with a quadruple bond would have remained the one with the shortest metal-metal bond for 50 years. Al Cotton would have loved these new compounds. I am sorry that someone shortened his life, so that he could not read these papers himself. Stephen Koch SUNY Stony Brook