"Superatoms" Mimic Elements: Research Reveals New Perspective of Periodic Table

[Occulus]

Found via this Kos diary:

28 December 2009 — Transforming lead into gold is an impossible feat, but a similar type of "alchemy" is not only possible, but cost-effective too. Three Penn State researchers have shown that certain combinations of elemental atoms have electronic signatures that mimic the electronic signatures of other elements. According to the team's leader A. Welford Castleman Jr., Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science and Evan Pugh Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics, "the findings could lead to much cheaper materials for widespread applications such as new sources of energy, methods of pollution abatement, and catalysts on which industrial nations depend heavily for chemical processing."


The researchers also showed that the atoms that have been identified so far in these mimicry events can be predicted simply by looking at the periodic table. The team used advanced experimentation and theory to quantify these new and unexpected findings. "We're getting a whole new perspective of the periodic table," said Castleman. The team's findings will be published in the 28 December 2009 early on-line issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Castleman and his team — which includes Samuel Peppernick, a former Penn State graduate student who now is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Dasitha Gunaratne, a Penn State graduate student — used a technique, called photoelectron imaging spectroscopy, to examine similarities between titanium monoxide and nickel, zirconium monoxide and palladium, and tungsten carbide and platinum. "Photoelectron spectroscopy measures the energy it takes to remove electrons from various electronic states of atoms or molecules, while simultaneously capturing snapshots of these electron-detachment events with a digital camera," said Castleman. "The method allows us to determine the binding energies of the electrons and also to observe directly the nature of the orbitals in which the electrons resided before they were detached. We found that the amount of energy required to remove electrons from a titanium-monoxide molecule is the same as the amount of energy required to remove electrons from a nickel atom. The same is true for the systems zirconium monoxide and palladium and tungsten carbide and platinum. The key is that all of the pairs are composed of isoelectronic species, which are atoms with the same electron configuration." Castleman noted that, in this case, the term isoelectronic refers to the number of electrons present in the outer shell of an atom or molecule.

more...

The full paper can be found here. This is the sort of discovery that could end up making fuel cells (and other devices that use an expensive catalyst) significantly cheaper, and that's a Good Thing.

[Brickbat]

1. Hee, I thought that said "supermoms."

[Juche]

2. Nice

Hopefully they can use this to bypass the rare earth element shortage we are likely to face due to Chinese monopolies on supply.

[DCKit]

3. Replace the platinum in catalytic converters with tungsten carbide....

and they'll become nearly worthless and stay on the cars. What a way to destroy the market for stolen CCs.

I really hope this opens a whole new field of chemistry.

[Occulus]

4. It very well may

If these properties extend across the entire periodic table, we'll have to look at elements in a whole new light. As I think the Kos diary mentioned, this may eventually require us to create a periodic table (replacement?) that's three-dimensional to properly view the relationships that create these superatoms.

Of course, this line of thought leads to the question of whether the properties of very unstable, synthetic elements created by particle accelerators can be mimicked by superatoms. I wonder.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Wow! It's like someone thought to replace silicon ...

with (isoelectronic) gallium arsenide!

(OK, it's not exactly the same ... but sounds too close for the novelty to impress much. And their use of the term 'isoelectronic' does not match the well-established standard usage.)

Lots of things could lead to breakthrough materials. We'll see.