Helium happily shares electrons to create dianions
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Posted by: Tarun Kumar Helium, the most parsimonious element that invariably sits with its arms tightly folded and refuses to participate in chemistry, turns out to be surprisingly generous when it is in the right environment, willing to donate not just one but two electrons to neighbouring species. Researchers from Austria and the UK made the surprising discovery by generating for the first time isolated dianions – which are inherently unstable and therefore rare – in nanodroplets of helium. The work opens the way to creating other dianions and also to the wider study of helium as an unlikely electron donor. ‘Dianions are important building blocks in chemistry but are often unstable and difficult to make in isolation because of the strong Coulomb repulsion between the two electrons: bringing an electron to an anion has a very high energy barrier,’ explains Jan Verlet of Durham University in the UK, who was not involved in the research. The team, led by Andrew Elli