No abstract

Experimental investigations of transactinoide elements provide benchmark results for chemical theory and probe the predictive power of trends in the periodic table. So far, in gas-phase chemical reactions, simple inorganic compounds with the transactinoide in its highest oxidation state have been synthesized. Single-atom production rates, short half-lives, and harsh experimental conditions limited the number of experimentally accessible compounds. We applied a gas-phase carbonylation technique previously tested on short-lived molybdenum (Mo) and tungsten (W) isotopes to the preparation of a carbonyl complex of seaborgium, the 106th element. The volatile seaborgium complex showed the same volatility and reactivity with a silicon dioxide surface as those of the hexacarbonyl complexes of the lighter homologs Mo and W. Comparison of the product's adsorption enthalpy with theoretical predictions and data for the lighter congeners supported a Sg(CO)6 formulation.

We performed a theoretical investigation for the selectivity of Eu(III)/Am(III) ions depending on the donor atoms by means of all-electron ZORA-DFT calculation. We estimated their selectivity as the relative stability in the complex formation reaction. The B2PLYP functional reproduced the experimental selectivity in which S- and N-donor ligands favor Am(III) ion, but O-donor ligand favors Eu(III) ion. Mulliken's bond overlap population analysis revealed that the contribution of the f orbital to the bonding was small or zero for Eu complex, whereas it was large for Am complex. The bonding nature of the f orbital for Am ion was the bonding type to S- and N-donor ligands, while it was the antibonding type to O-donor ligand. It was suggested that the difference in the bonding nature between the f orbital in the metal and the donor atoms determines the selectivity of Eu(III)/Am(III) by donor ligands.

We have performed benchmark investigations into the bonding properties in lanthanide and actinide complexes to quantitatively estimate the covalency of f-block compounds. Three different density functionals including BP86 (pure-GGA), B3LYP (hybrid-GGA) and B2PLYP (double hybrid-GGA) were employed for all-electron self-consistent field calculations compensated by the scalar-relativistic zero-order regular approximation (ZORA) Hamiltonian with a relativistically contracted all-electron basis set. Ten Eu and ten Np complexes were employed as benchmark sets for the calculation of Mössbauer parameters for (151)Eu and (237)Np compounds. As a result of the linear fitting between the calculated electron densities at the nucleus (ρ) and the experimental isomer shifts (δ(exp)), the calculations performed using the all-electron ZORA-B2PLYP level reproduced a change of electron density at the Mössbauer nucleus for both Eu and Np complexes with high correlation coefficients (R(2) > 0.90). Mulliken's population analyses indicated that the BP86 and B3LYP methods overestimated the covalency of both Eu and Np complexes due to the smaller amount of the exact Hartree-Fock exchange admixture included in BP86 and B3PLYP compared to that in the B2PLYP functional. By comparing Mulliken's electronic structure analyses with the experimental isomer shifts, we found that Mulliken's spin population values were good parameters to quantitatively estimate the bonding natures of Eu and Np complexes.