This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Hydrogen—the lightest atom—does the heavy lifting when it comes to important chemical reactions. It can be stored and released as clean fuel, and its movements help catalysts build medicines, fertilizers and materials.
One way hydrogen is available for use is through a hydride—a hydrogen (H) atom bound to a metal. Yet with standard tools, this metal-bound atom can be hard to find in the structure. In a new study, Yale researchers evaluated methods for pinpointing the hydride location in a cobalt-hydride crystal structure, and one stood out.
"We discovered that a microcrystal electron diffractometer (MicroED) can accurately locate the hydride better than X-ray methods," said Patrick Holland, senior co-author of the study and the Whitehead Professor of Chemistry. This work shows a practical path to reliably identifying and measuring the locations of hydrides, which could help researchers better understand and design catalysts and other molecules. "The MicroED system has been a boon to our research," said Holland.
The study appears in ACS Central Science. The challenge with studying hydrides is that the available tools are either ineffective or impractical. With standard X-ray crystallography, which provides a 3D map of a molecule, the large metal atom obscures the view of the tiny H atom.
Alternatively, neutron crystallography (the "gold standard" for precise measurements) requires a specialized facility that most scientists can't access. There are only a handful of such facilities in the world. Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which helped validate this study, is one of them.
Clearly, researchers need a more feasible alternative, and electron diffraction shows promise. "The advantage of using electrons is that they interact more strongly with samples and diffract through a different mechanism than X-rays. This makes them more effective at determining the accurate location of the H atom," said Ryan Donnelly, first author and graduate student in Holland's lab.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
