Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Researchers grew crystals of a pure actinium compound, seen here through a microscope, to understand how actinium binds to other molecules in a solid. Credit: Jen Wacker/Berkeley Lab
“There’s a breadth of applications for these elements, from nuclear energy to medicine to national security, but if we don’t know how they behave, that inhibits the progress we can make,” said Jen Wacker, first author of the paper recently published inand a chemist at Berkeley Lab. “We’re seeing that this work is necessary to really understand the complexity of these radioactive elements, because in a lot of cases, using their surrogates is not sufficient to understand their chemistry.
The crystals, grown over a week inside of the Heavy Element Research Laboratory, were then cryocooled in liquid nitrogen and illuminated with X-rays at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source . The X-rays revealed the compound’s 3D structure and showed how actinium interacted with surrounding atoms. It is the first single-crystal X-ray structure reported for actinium
“This is very fundamental science that is part of our core program in understanding the chemistry of heavy elements,” Abergel said. “We’ve achieved a really technically difficult experimental method that pushes the boundaries of isotope chemistry and lets us gain a better understanding of this element. It hopefully will enable us and others to develop better systems that are useful for targeted alpha therapy.
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