Tuesday, 29. March 2005
Topic: SCIENCE - on March 29, 2005 at 8:14:00 PM CEST
Super-atoms
Time to revise the periodic table? Maybe we should, now that we have a new class of chemical building blocks called superatoms—atomic clusters that behave like individual atoms. Motivated by evidence that electrons in groups of aluminum atoms might form closed “shells,” physicists A. Welford Castleman Jr. at Pennsylvania State University and Shiv N. Khanna at Virginia Commonwealth University began searching for stable configurations of these atoms. “We thought if we could figure out some way of taking advantage of this, maybe we could make some new materials,” says Castleman. “Then we found a few magic numbers.”
... Comment
