Disodium helide (Na₂He) is a compound of

helium Helium (from ) is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic, inert gas, inert, monatomic gas and the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is ...

and

sodium Sodium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Na (from Neo-Latin ) and atomic number 11. It is a soft, silvery-white, highly reactive metal. Sodium is an alkali metal, being in group 1 element, group 1 of the peri ...

that is stable at high pressures above . It was first predicted using the USPEX

crystal structure prediction Crystal structure prediction (CSP) is the calculation of the crystal structures of solids from first principles. Reliable methods of predicting the crystal structure of a compound, based only on its composition, has been a goal of the physical scien ...

algorithm and then synthesised in 2016.

Synthesis

Na₂He was predicted to be

thermodynamically stable In chemistry, chemical stability is the thermodynamic stability of a chemical system, in particular a chemical compound or a polymer. Colloquially, it may instead refer to kinetic persistence, the shelf-life of a metastable substance or system; th ...

over 160 GPa and dynamically stable over 100 GPa. This means it should be possible to form at the higher pressure and then decompress to 100 GPa, but below that it would decompose. Compared with other

binary compound In materials chemistry, a binary phase or binary compound is a chemical compound containing two different elements. Some binary phase compounds are molecular, e.g. carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). More typically binary phase refers to extended soli ...

s of other elements and helium, it was predicted to be stable at the lowest pressure of any such combination. This also means, for example, that a helium-potassium compound is predicted to require much higher pressures of the order of terapascals. The material was synthesized by putting tiny plates of sodium in a

diamond anvil cell A diamond anvil cell (DAC) is a high-pressure device used in geology, engineering, and materials science experiments. It permits the compression of a small (sub- millimeter-sized) piece of material to extreme pressures, typically up to around 1 ...

along with helium at 1600 bar and then compressing to 130 GPa and heating to 1,500 K with a laser. Disodium helide is predicted to be an insulator and transparent. At 200 GPa the sodium atoms have a Bader charge of +0.599, the helium charge is −0.174, and the two-electron spots are each near −0.511. This phase could be called disodium helium electride. Disodium helide melts at a high temperature near 1,500 K, much higher than the melting point of sodium. When decompressed, it can keep its form as low as 113 GPa. As pressure increases, the sodium is predicted to gain more positive charge, the helium to lose negative charge and the free electron density to increase. Energy is compensated by the relative shrinking of the helium atoms and the space for electrons.

Structure

Disodium helide has a cubic crystal structure, resembling that of

fluorite Fluorite (also called fluorspar) is the mineral form of calcium fluoride, CaF2. It belongs to the halide minerals. It crystallizes in isometric cubic habit, although octahedral and more complex isometric forms are not uncommon. The Mohs scal ...

. At 300 GPa the edge of a

unit cell In geometry, biology, mineralogy and solid state physics, a unit cell is a repeating unit formed by the vectors spanning the points of a lattice. Despite its suggestive name, the unit cell (unlike a unit vector In mathematics, a unit vector i ...

of the crystal has . Each unit cell contains four helium atoms on the centre of the cube faces and corners, and eight sodium atoms at coordinates halfway between the center and each corner. Electron pairs (2e⁻) are positioned on each edge and the centre of the unit cell. Each pair of electrons is

spin Spin or spinning most often refers to: * Spin (physics) or particle spin, a fundamental property of elementary particles * Spin quantum number, a number which defines the value of a particle's spin * Spinning (textiles), the creation of yarn or thr ...

paired. The presence of these isolated electrons makes this an

electride An electride is an ionic compound in which an electron serves the role of the anion. Solutions Solutions of alkali metals in ammonia are electride salts. In the case of sodium, these blue solutions consist of a(NH3)6sup>+ and solvated electron ...

. The helium atoms do not participate in any bonding; however, the electron pairs can be considered as an eight-centre two-electron bond.

Footnotes

References

{{sodium compounds Sodium compounds Helium compounds Binary compounds Substances discovered in the 2010s Electrides