Inorganic Chemistry paper

A new paper is coming out! These are always good news for someone whose productivity is evaluated by the number of his/her publications, and in my case the pleasure is double. It turns out that despite the fact a scientist is continuously working, there isn’t always the possibility of having results put “out there”. Back in Mexico we have the “National Researchers System” in which the National Council for Science and Technology encourages us to keep on working by providing economical stimuli and evaluating our productivity by, yes, the number of papers published each year. For three years I worked for a private research center in which fundamental science was tackled as far as it was economically possible and cost effective. Practically all of the work carried out there was confidential since the company it belonged to is leader in its market, not only in Mexico but in Latin America and southern USA!  At this facility some papers were published from time to time (most of them came from research in molecular modeling) but not without struggle against the administrators. We can thank for most of the struggle (and the papers!) to Dr. Armando Gama-Goicochea, a great physicist as well as a great friend of mine.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that I’m excited about having a new paper coming out again, even if I’m nowhere close to being first author. This three year paper fastening seems to be over and let us hope it’s only the first of various now that I’m holding a postdoc position here in Romania.

In this paper we tackled the bonding properties of some Aluminum complexes with three chalcogeno triazoles. The electrostatic potential mapped onto a density surface of one of those compounds is currently shown in the header of this blog, btw. We concluded that the bonding in such compounds is mainly covalent as opposed to the more conventional electrostatic notion prevailing for such hard atoms. In order to get this information we resorted to Natural Bonding Analysis calculations with the RHF method and somewhat large basis sets in order to get a full description of the electronic density.

I very much like these systems in which several bonding possibilities occur. The fact that nature is chosing one out of many has always a reason which can be assessed by our models and may serve us to learn how to modify it’s behaviour.

Coordination Diversity of Aluminum Centers Molded by Triazole Based Chalcogen Ligands

Jocelyn Alcántara-García, Vojtech Jancik, Joaquín Barroso, Sandra Hidalgo-Bonilla, Raymundo Cea-Olivares, Rubén A. Toscano and Mónica Moya-Cabrera