Efficiently Harvesting Chemical Information on Rare Isotopes with Minimal Material
Scientists have developed a new approach to harvest detailed chemical information on radioactive and/or enriched stable isotopes, requiring 1,000 times less material than previous state-of-the-art methods. The new method leverages polyoxometalate ligands (POMs), a class of molecules that has so far been largely overlooked for radiochemistry applications. The intrinsic properties of the POMs allow scientists to easily form compounds where the POMs form chemical bonds with the targeted radioisotopes, then crystallize these compounds, then study them with a wide variety of spectroscopic techniques while just using a few micrograms of material, compared to multiple milligrams or more for previous methods.