Monday, May 04, 2009

Copper butterfly

In a recent paper, I came across this rather poetic description:

Each of the Cu(I) centers is trigonally coordinated by three S atoms, and each of the six dithiophosphate ligands is connected to a Cu4 butterfly, where the hinge positions are occupied by two copper atoms situated at the vertex of the central tetrahedron and the wingtips are two capping Cu atoms.

However, to understand what they are talking about, one really should see one of these beautiful structures in 3D. I used this CIF file and Mercury program to create the image below.

Copper butterfly

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