For a little more than a century, chemists have believed that strong atomic links called covalent bonds are formed when atoms share one or more electron pairs. Now, researchers have made the first observations of single-electron covalent bonds between two carbon atoms.
This unusual bonding behaviour has been seen between a few other atoms, but scientists are particularly excited to see it in carbon, the basic building block of life on Earth and the key component of industrial chemicals including drugs, plastics, sugars and proteins. The discovery was published1 in Nature on 25 September.
“The covalent bond is one of the most important concepts in chemistry, and discovery of new types of chemical bonds holds great promise for expanding vast areas of chemical space,” says University of Tokyo chemist Takuya Shimajiri, who was part of the carbon bonding research team.
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