Talk:Crystallography on stamps

Re₂X₈

​ I'm not sure that the The Soviet Union 1968 CPA 3661 stamp (Chemistry Institute and Dimetric Anion).jpg stamp has much to do with crystallography. It's showing a molecule or anion of dinuclear rhenium complex, or dimeric anion if you want (maybe octachlorodirhenate). Not dimetric, which however seems to be unrelated crystallography term. —Mykhal (talk) 15:18, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

@Mykhal: Thanks for your comment. Firstly you are correct about dimeric not dimetric: I used the word in the title of the image but it is incorrect. I will change it to dimeric in the article.

Secondly, one of the reasons the image was selected is that there only a few crystallography stamps available on Commons because of copyright restrictions on modern stamps by many countries. However this does not apply to Russian/Soviet stamps.

Thirdly, the explanation for using this specific image is as follows: "The first report on the Re₂Cl₈²⁻ structure and its short rhenium–rhenium bond appeared in a conference abstract by Russian scientists in 1961 (Koz’min PA, Kuznetsov VG (1961) Abstracts of All-union conference on crystal chemistry. Shtiints, Kishinev, pp 74–75). Then came, in 1964, the paper by Cotton and coworkers, in which, based on their X-ray structural study it was suggested for the first time that the extremely short distance between the two rhenium atoms is due to a quadruple metal–metal bond (Cotton FA, Curtis NF, Harris CB, Johnson BFG, Lippard SJ, Mague JT, Robinson WR, Wood JS (1964) Science 145:1305)." Source: Obituary, F. Albert Cotton (1930–2007). Struct. Chem. 18, 527–528 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11224-007-9201-y, Hargittai, M. (emphasis added)

Thus it was an x-ray crystallography study that first detected a metal-to-metal quadruple bond. The full story is given by F. Albert Cotton in Multiple Bonds Between Metal Atoms by F. Albert Cotton, Carlos A. Murillo and Richard A. Walton, 3^rd edition, Springer, New York, 2005, pages 3-8, ISBN 0-387-22605-2 GreatStellatedDodecahedron (talk) 21:27, 5 September 2024 (UTC)