Many MindedChemists make free hydrogen atoms in solution with LED light and two cheap reagents
A laboratory at University College London, led by Roopender Kumar, has developed a way to generate atomic hydrogen in a flask. Atomic hydrogen is a single proton with a single electron. That unpaired electron makes it a highly reactive radical. Nils Flodén of the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam collaborated, and the work appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The method mixes hydrazine and thiophenol, two inexpensive commercial chemicals, and shines near-UV light from a standard LED lamp on them. The two reagents form an intermediate that absorbs the light. That triggers electron transfer and a short-lived unstable species, which releases a hydrogen atom. This happens at 30°C in solution. In the reported experiments, the atoms added onto carbon double bonds to make single bonds and stripped halogens from molecules.
The older routes were harder to use. Irving Langmuir made atomic hydrogen in 1912 by heating molecular hydrogen over a tungsten filament above 1,700°C. James Franck's 1922 mercury method needs toxic, heavily regulated mercury vapor and specialized UV lamps. Robert Crabtree's 1991 work used mercury to saturate olefins, but only in vapor, not in the liquid solutions where synthetic chemists usually work.
The abundance relevance is indirect. Cheaper, safer access to hydrogen atoms at the bench could widen who can study and use hydrogen chemistry, which touches energy research. It is a fundamental result and has no near-term cost impact on energy.
Caveats: our source is an explainer by the researcher, not an independent assessment. The author words the key claim cautiously, and the text we saw was cut off, so later results and applications are missing. Watch for independent replication and for uses beyond these two reactions.
Source: Phys.org