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Carbon bond that uses only one electron seen for first time: ‘It will be in the textbooks’

The fundamental discovery deepens scientists’ understanding of chemical bonding.
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  1. Katherine Bourzac

    1. Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist in San Francisco, California.

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For a little more than a century, chemists have known 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 covalent bonds that form when two carbon atoms share a single electron.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03138-2

References

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