Underappreciated compared to its heavier metal counterparts, chromium failed for more than 30 years to turn nitrogen gas into ammonia, a reaction that involves breaking one tough bond and making ...

J. Chris Slootweg, a phosphorus chemist at the University of Amsterdam, says the s-orbital character of the phosphorus atom’s lone pair of electrons suggests that the compound will be an ...

A phosphorus atom precisely positioned within a sheet of silicon could one day be a building block for traditional or quantum computers. ... (see diagram, right). Adding phosphine gas ...

Mysterious form of phosphorus may be used as shadow currency by marine microbes, ... the phosphorus atom has an oxidation state — a theoretical measure of how many electrons it shares — of +5.

For most industrial uses, phosphorus has to be attached one atom at a time, ... so chemists expected that phosphorus might form a stable P 2 structure. However, that is not the case.