Chemists confirm new form of chemical bond: vibrational

February 3, 2015

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Those of us who still remember high school chemistry class know that there are three types of chemical bond: ionic, covalent and metallic.

But now, an international team of chemists has confirmed evidence of a new, albeit fleeting, type of chemical bond: vibrational.

According to a report in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition journal, researchers first suspected another type of chemical bond during experiments conducted in 1989 using reactions between bromine and an isotope of hydrogen called muonium. The chemists conducting those experiments found that when the increase the temperature of their reaction, it appeared to slow down.

Donald Fleming, a University of British Columbia chemist who was involved in that study and the new study, told Scientific American that he though bromine and muonium might have formed a brief molecular structure via a kind of vibrational bond.

According to Fleming, the bond forms when a muonium becomes trapped between two much larger bromine atoms and begins to ping-pong back and forth. This action would have the effect of briefly holding the three atoms together.

At the time of the original experiments, researchers didnt have the technology to observe this theoretical new kind of bond, but three years ago Fleming and his colleagues were able to use a nuclear accelerator to perform a new set of experiments. These trials were complimented by theoretical calculations from chemists at Free University of Berlin and Saitama University in Japan.

Using both the calculations and the actual experiments, the researchers were able to determine that vibrational bonds do exist on the scale of milliseconds. The study team found that the bond lowered the total energy of the molecular structureexplaining why higher temperature causing the reaction to slow down.

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Chemists confirm new form of chemical bond: vibrational