Sixty years of 'too unstable to exist' — then two students' unexpected crystals proved everyone wrong

Since the early 1960s, chemists have chased a family of molecules called oxoboranes — built around a triple bond between boron and oxygen — and nearly all had given up, because the bond seemed simply too unstable to ever hold in a lasting form. At the University of Würzburg in Germany, two doctoral students, Lukas Lubczyk and Christian Markl, each tried a different simple reaction — and both were surprised to find unusual orange and yellow solids that turned out to be exactly those elusive molecules. Led by Professor Holger Braunschweig, who has spent more than 15 years on boron's reluctant bonds, and backed by computer modelling from Professor Ashwini K. Phukan's team at Tezpur University in India, the researchers isolated three stable oxoboranes, reported in Nature Chemistry. It closes one of chemistry's longest-running hunts — and the same trick may now open the door to other 'impossible' molecules across the periodic table.

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