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High-Energy Variations of Table Salt Show Exciting Possibilities

29 Jan, 2014 | Labroots

The rules of chemistry have been well understood for ages. It's also known that under extreme conditions of temperature/pressure that these rules aren't always followed, creating unusual chemical variations. Assumptions inherent in the rules of classical chemistry may break down under extreme high-energy conditions and allow for chemical configurations that couldn't be formed normally. A recent article in Science covers one journey into the oddities of high-pressure chemistry using the most ordinary of compounds—sodium chloride, or common table salt. Researchers from Stony Brook University and the Carnegie Institution of Science teamed up to model and produce variations of sodium chloride under extreme conditions. Using algorithms and new computational methods to predict the possible changes that could occur to sodium chloride under high pressure, the team identified several combinations that were more likely to occur, and produced them in a stable form under the predicted conditions. The program used to predict these new compounds is called USPEX, short for Universal Structure Predictor: Evolutionary Xrystallography. Sodium chloride (Na Cl) is a great choice for study, as it forms simple cubic crystals and has an inherently stable formation through a simple ionic bond (through the donation of one extra electron of sodium to the chlorine atom that is deficient by one electron, forming a stable electron configuration around both atoms as expected by the octet rule). By starting with simple rock salt and introducing small amounts of either sodium or chlorine to adjust the stoichiometry, increasing the pressure to hundreds of thousands of atmospheres in a diamond anvil, and heating the samples with lasers, the research team was able to create compounds that violate the octet rule, such as NaCl₃ and Na₃Cl. Not only are these compounds stable under those conditions, but due to the variations from the classic crystal structure, they can have unusual, and potentially beneficial, properties. For example, the compound Na3Cl has a layered structure with a one layer of NaCl and another containing only sodium. This structure combines an electrically conducting layer (sodium) with an insulating dielectric layer (NaCl). Such configurations, if stable, are extremely useful in microelectronic and nanotechnology applications.