Inorganic chemistry articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phospholipids enhance the structural and colloidal integrity of hybrid organic–inorganic lead halide perovskites and lead-free metal halide nanocrystals, which then exhibit enhanced robustness and optical properties.

    • Viktoriia Morad
    • , Andriy Stelmakh
    •  & Maksym V. Kovalenko

  • Article |

    The design, synthesis and characterization of a series of circular sandwich compounds, cyclocenes, is described, and these cyclic sandwich compounds are expected to lead to further innovations in new functional organometallic materials.

    • Luca Münzfeld
    • , Sebastian Gillhuber
    •  & Peter W. Roesky

  • Article |

    Many aspects of materials chemistry rely on singlet–triplet spin conversion, but spin–vibronic effects are shown to accelerate the process when vibronic coupling causes the quantum-mechanical mixing of spin states.

    • Shahnawaz R. Rather
    • , Nicholas P. Weingartz
    •  & Lin X. Chen

  • News & Views |

    The ability to separate the radioactive element americium from spent nuclear fuel would lower the long-term hazards of nuclear waste. An inorganic molecular cage that selectively binds to americium opens up a separation strategy.

    • May Nyman
    •  & Gauthier Deblonde

  • Article |

    A LaCl3-based lithium superionic conductor is developed that has excellent interfacial compatibility with lithium metal electrodes, with its optimized Li0.388Ta0.238La0.475Cl3 electrolyte exhibiting good Li+ conductivity and low activation energy.

    • Yi-Chen Yin
    • , Jing-Tian Yang
    •  & Hong-Bin Yao

  • Research Briefing |

    A generalizable technique has been developed to create diverse functional inorganic membranes on the surface of various aqueous solutions. The technique ensures that the air–liquid interface receives a continuous supply of floating particles, which then assemble dynamically to form continuous membranes.

  • News & Views |

    A light-activated ‘plasmonic’ catalyst, made from abundant elements, produces as much hydrogen from ammonia as do the most-used heat-activated catalysts based on a rarer element, suggesting a strategy for sustainable chemical production.

    • Emiliano Cortés

  • News & Views |

    Molecules of heavy water contain the deuterium isotope of hydrogen and have been impossible to separate from ordinary water. Nanoporous materials with flexible apertures in their structures point the way to a solution.

    • Thomas Heine
    •  & Randall Q. Snurr

  • Article |

    Using a molecular catalyst and a proton–electron transfer mediator in tandem delivers efficient electroreduction of nitrogen to ammonia at modest potentials, an approach that could be used to improve other important reactions.

    • Pablo Garrido-Barros
    • , Joseph Derosa
    •  & Jonas C. Peters

  • News & Views |

    Porous solids have been dispersed in water to produce suspensions that can carry much more oxygen than blood can. Such ‘porous water’ opens the way to water-based formulations for biomedical use.

    • Margarida Costa Gomes

  • Article |

    Modification of the internal and external surface chemistry of microporous zeolite and metal–organic framework nanocrystals leads to a generalizable strategy to aqueous porous liquids and impart high gas-carrying capacities to liquid water.

    • Daniel P. Erdosy
    • , Malia B. Wenny
    •  & Jarad A. Mason

  • Article |

    Iron atoms in a synthetic metal–sulfur cluster can capture nitrogen and catalyse its silylation, demonstrating successful nitrogen reduction by iron atoms in a sulfur-rich environment.

    • Yasuhiro Ohki
    • , Kenichiro Munakata
    •  & Kazuki Tanifuji

  • News & Views |

    Enzymes use molecular clusters containing iron and sulfur atoms to bind and ‘fix’ nitrogen gas into a bioavailable form. A synthetic cluster that binds and reduces nitrogen molecules casts light on the mechanism of fixation.

    • Daniël L. J. Broere

  • News & Views |

    The landmark synthesis of a xenon compound in the early 1960s dispelled a long-standing myth about the reactivity of the noble gases — and opened the door to the rich chemistry of these elements, studies of which continue today.

    • Felice Grandinetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pressures of up to 900 gigapascals (9 million atmospheres) are achieved in a laser-heated double-stage diamond cell, enabling the synthesis of Re7N3, and materials characterization is performed in situ using single-crystal X-ray diffraction.

    • Leonid Dubrovinsky
    • , Saiana Khandarkhaeva
    •  & Natalia Dubrovinskaia

  • News & Views |

    The scarcity and high radioactivity of the heaviest actinide elements, such as californium, make their study a formidable challenge. A landmark report describes the first structural characterization of a californium—carbon bond.

    • Julie E. Niklas
    •  & Henry S. La Pierre

  • Article |

    Chemical experiments on californium are stymied by isotope availability and radioactivity considerations, but are advanced here with synthesis and characterization of an organometallic complex.

    • Conrad A. P. Goodwin
    • , Jing Su
    •  & Joseph W. Ziller

  • News & Views |

    Layered perovskites are useful materials that contain sheets of a perovskite semiconductor enclosed by organic molecules. Crystals of layered perovskites that include sheets of a second inorganic lattice can now be grown from solution.

    • Roman Krahne
    •  & Milena P. Arciniegas

  • News & Views |

    Magnesium atoms typically lose two electrons to form chemical compounds. A reactive complex has finally been made in which magnesium keeps all of its electrons, and which can be thought of as a soluble form of the metal.

    • Cameron Jones

  • Article |

    Strongly reducing β-diketiminate complexes containing magnesium in its zero oxidation state are reported, among which is a compound with a linear triatomic Mg–Mg–Mg core.

    • B. Rösch
    • , T. X. Gentner
    •  & S. Harder

  • Nature Podcast |

    Exploring the properties of a vanishingly-rare artificial element, and the AI that generates new mathematical conjectures.

    • Shamini Bundell
    •  & Nick Petrić Howe

  • Article |

    An einsteinium coordination complex is synthesized and spectroscopically characterized using less than 200 nanograms of einsteinium, enabling examination of its structure and measurement of an einsteinium bond distance.

    • Korey P. Carter
    • , Katherine M. Shield
    •  & Rebecca J. Abergel

  • Article |

    An iron complex sequentially activates N2 and C–H bonds in benzene to form aniline, with coupling achieved through partial silylation of a reduced iron–nitrogen complex and phenyl migration.

    • Sean F. McWilliams
    • , Daniël L. J. Broere
    •  & Patrick L. Holland

  • Article |

    Enhanced covalency is achieved for a curium complex with curium–sulfur bonds by subjecting the compound to high pressures, indicating that pressure can be used to tune covalency in actinide compounds.

    • Joseph M. Sperling
    • , Evan J. Warzecha
    •  & Thomas E. Albrecht-Schönzart

  • Article |

    Information from quantum coherence observations guides synthetic modifications of an iron-based chromophore, increasing the excited-state dynamics lifetime by a factor of 20, with implications for photo-induced electron-transfer applications.

    • Bryan C. Paulus
    • , Sara L. Adelman
    •  & James K. McCusker

  • Article |

    The synthesis of uranium- and thorium-containing metallabiphenylenes demonstrates the ability of the actinides to stabilize aromatic/antiaromatic structures where transition metals have failed.

    • Justin K. Pagano
    • , Jing Xie
    •  & Jaqueline L. Kiplinger

  • Article |

    Redox-switchable chelation is demonstrated for a carborane cluster molecule, leading to controlled chemical or electrochemical capture and release of uranyl in monophasic or biphasic model solvent systems.

    • Megan Keener
    • , Camden Hunt
    •  & Gabriel Ménard

  • Letter |

    A six-coordinate transition-metal complex with a hexagonal planar geometry is isolated and characterized.

    • Martí Garçon
    • , Clare Bakewell
    •  & Mark R. Crimmin

  • Letter |

    Human scientists make unrepresentative chemical reagent and reaction condition choices, and machine-learning algorithms trained on human-selected experiments are less capable of successfully predicting reaction outcomes than those trained on randomly generated experiments.

    • Xiwen Jia
    • , Allyson Lynch
    •  & Joshua Schrier

  • News & Views |

    Ammonia is vital to society, but its manufacture is energy intensive, has a large carbon footprint and requires high initial capital outlays. An intriguing reaction now suggests that energy-efficient alternatives are possible.

    • Máté J. Bezdek
    •  & Paul J. Chirik

  • Letter |

    An aluminium compound is synthesized in which the aluminium is formally anionic; reactions with various substrates suggest that this compound acts as the nucleophilic partner in both metal–carbon and metal–metal bond-forming reactions.

    • Jamie Hicks
    • , Petra Vasko
    •  & Simon Aldridge

  • Letter |

    Metal complexes of the pentazole anion exhibit multiple coordination modes, through ionic, covalent and hydrogen-bonding interactions, and good thermal stability with onset decomposition temperatures greater than 100 °C.

    • Yuangang Xu
    • , Qian Wang
    •  & Ming Lu

  • Letter |

    A bottom-up process to achieve rapid growth of micrometre-sized three-dimensional nanocrystal superlattices during colloidal synthesis at high temperatures is revealed by in situ small-angle X-ray scattering; the process is applicable to several colloidal materials.

    • Liheng Wu
    • , Joshua J. Willis
    •  & Christopher J. Tassone

  • News & Views |

    An innovative combination of chemical synthesis, theory and spectroscopy could simplify determination of the structures of naturally occurring, biologically active molecules, which are often leads for drug discovery. See Letter p.436

    • Severin K. Thompson
    •  & Thomas R. Hoye

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