Abstract
During the past decade a considerable amount of evidence has accumulated for the existence of an anion of sodium, Na−, as a stable, long-lived entity in certain non-aqueous solvents1–7. The term sodium anion refers to a spherically symmetric diamagnetic species in which, in the orbital model of atomic structure, the two valence electrons are accommodated in the 3s orbital of sodium7. We report here direct measurements of 23Na nuclear spin–lattice relaxation rates for Na−, coupled with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shift data, which are used to show that Na− in solution is almost completely decoupled from its environment, behaving as if it were in the gas phase.
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Ellaboudy, A., Holton, D., Pyper, N. et al. Gas-like nature of the sodium anion in solution. Nature 321, 684–685 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1038/321684a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/321684a0
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