In this week’s edition of Chemical & Engineering News, Stephen K. Ritter discusses the new discoveries in the area of chemical bonding with emphasis on the recent theoretical paper by Marcin Brynda et al. (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 3804) that followed the report of the first quintuple bond in the dichromium complex Ar’CrCrAr’, (C&EN, Sept. 26, 2005, p. 9) by Prof. Power’s group in 2005 (Science, 2005, 310, 844). The theoretical calculations, performed on a simpler PhCrCrPh model, support the claim for a quintuple bond in the dichromium compound and its measured bond lengths. This theoretical paper made in collaboration with Prof. Philip P. Power, Björn O. Roos and Per-Olof Widmark of Lund University, in Sweden, and Laura Gagliardi of the University of Geneva, in Switzerland, was also recently selected as the paper of the week in Science magazine (Science, 2006, 312, 975).

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