Magnesium borohydride, Mg(BH4)2, a long-sought candidate for efficient hydrogen storage chemisorption technology, has been obtained in a pure and crystalline form by two new synthetic routes in a hydrocarbon solvent. A first synthetic approach involves a metathetical reaction between organometallic magnesium compounds; a second route consists of an insertion reaction of BH3 species, released from BH3.S(CH3)2, into the Mg-C bonds of MgR2, with complete replacement of R groups with BH4 groups. Both methods, based on commercially available reagents, afford identical, pure, polycrystalline materials, identified by X-ray diffraction as the so-called low-temperature hexagonal form of Mg(BH4)2, stable below 180 degrees C, recently shown to possess a complex, unpredictable, crystal structure.

Nanophasic tungsten oxides thin films have been deposited at 500 °C on quartz and glass substrates starting from W(CO)6 using the metal organic chemical vapor deposition technique (MOCVD). Two series of deposition experiments were carried out to make a comparison between the results obtained employing, as reactant gases, O2 mixed with water vapor and a dry mixture of N2 with 25% H2, respectively. The obtained tungsten oxides were analyzed by x-ray diffraction (XRD), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in order to investigate their microstructure, chemical composition, and surface morphology. In this work, XPS analyses of two tungsten oxides thin films deposited in different atmospheres are presented. Besides the wide scan spectra, charge corrected binding energies for the W 4f7/2, W 4f5/2, O ls, and C 1s surface photoelectron signals are reported. In particular, the film obtained in H2 atmosphere shows the presence of W in an oxidation state lower than VI.

The uranium-tin complex (cp)&J-SnPh3 (cp = v5-C5H5) has been prepared from (cp),UNEt2 and HSnPh3, and its crystal structure determined; it provides the first example of a compound with a uranium-tin bond.

In this work we use x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to analyze the principal core levels of a ZrO2 thin film deposited on glass using Zr(OPri)3(dpm) (OPri=isopropoxy; hdpm=2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-3,5-heptanedione) as precursor. Besides the general survey, charge corrected binding energies for the Zr 3d5/2, Zr 3d3/2, O 1s, and C 1s photoelectrons are reported. Deconvolution of the O 1s signal reveals the presence of –OH groups and adsorbed water, whose presence can be related to the air exposure of the film between its preparation and XPS analysis.

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