Abstract
We describe the history and provide a better understanding of the longtime puzzle of “molybdenum blue solutions”. Furthermore, with the discovery of various other structurally well-defined, giant, hydrophilic molybdenum-oxide based species, inorganic chemists have successfully pushed the size limit of inorganic ions into the nanometer scale. Consequently, this progress provides new challenges in different fields, for example, the physical chemistry of solutions. The giant anions show totally different solution behaviour when compared to regular inorganic ions, owing to their sizes and especially their surface properties.
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References
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See for instance the book Emsley J (2001) Nature’s building blocks: an A – Z guide to the elements. Oxford University Press, Oxford, chapter: Molybdenum, section: Element of history, p 263. There we read: About this time (1781) Scheele discovered a simple and specific test for molybdenum. […] (molybdate) would form an intense blue colour on adding a reducing agent to the solution. […]. The test was used for almost 200 years, despite the fact that chemists could not identify the agent responsible for the colour. In 1996 the puzzle was solved by a group of German chemists at the University of Bielefeld who showed it to consist of a cyclical cluster made up of 154 molybdenum atoms interlinked with oxygen atoms.; (b) Gouzerh P, Che M (2006) From Scheele and Berzelius to Müller: Polyoxometalates (POMs) revisited and the “missing link” between the bottom up and top down approaches, L’Actualité Chimique, June Issue, No. 298, 9
Shishido S, Ozeki T (2008) J Am Chem Soc 130:10588
Acknowledgments
We thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, the European Union, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research & Development (GIF) and the Volkswagen Foundation for continuous support of our work. We also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Tianbo Liu (Lehigh) who performed a series of investigations on the assembly processes of the giant molybdenum-oxide based clusters, and furthermore Andreas Dress (ICB Shanghai), Martin Chaplin (SBU London), Hermann Weingärtner (RUB Bochum) and their respective groups to this work (cf. references cited).
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Diemann, E., Müller, A. (2012). The Amazingly Complex Behaviour of Molybdenum Blue Solutions. In: Hill, C., Musaev, D.G. (eds) Complexity in Chemistry and Beyond: Interplay Theory and Experiment. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series B: Physics and Biophysics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5548-2_6
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