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Boron is a semi-metal found in compounds that help make everything from bleaches to glass cookware. It’s also a critical nutrient for green plants. This hard and heat-resistant material is mainly mined from sedimentary rock formations as a dark brown to black powder or a brittle, metallic crystalline metal.
But boron is also one of the most difficult elements to purify in significant quantities. Even so, chemical progress in the last decade has helped to reveal a host of interesting properties of this element. Among them is that it becomes a superconductor when compressed to very high levels. It turns out that this is the first time that a low-mass metal has become a superconductor at ambient pressures. A team led by Russell Hemley from the Carnegie Institute of Washington in the US has figured out how this happens. They’ve discovered that the crystal structure of boron changes at extreme pressures and that these changes are linked to the conductivity changes.
The research opens the door to new ways of creating organic and inorganic boron compounds. It also suggests that boron might be useful in quantum computing.
As a metal, boron is highly reactive and tends to form ionic bonds with other atoms. But boron can be coaxed into becoming a strong nucleophile in certain exotic bonding states. This is why it’s so valuable in alloying with other metals. Holger Braunschweig from Julius-Maximilians University of Wurzburg in Germany describes one example in which a compound called borylene acts as a powerful reducing agent when combining with dinitrogen to create nitrates. Borylene does this by accepting sigma donation from the nitrate’s nitrogen atom into an empty orbital and then donating a pair of electrons to the dinitrogen ring, weakening it.