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I thought that's why the periodic table was setup to look like it does in the first place. AKA right side are the noble gases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas

And on the left side the alkali metals Rubidium, Sodium and Lithium all both useful for batteries. (Lithium is significantly lighter, but Rubidium is more abundant etc.)

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What the article says is TiO (a molecule aka superatom) mimics Ni (an atom). The group is trying to add another layer of molecules (superatoms) over the 2D periodic table.

Disclosure: I was a graduate student of Dr. Castleman.

Hey awesome, I saw some people from your group speak at a conference a while ago and I was really intrigued by this idea. Especially the idea of making superatom analogues of Alali-Halide crystals. i.e. taking closed shell Al cluster cations and anions and packing them into an ionic crystal. What's the inside word on efforts to actually fabricate these things? Are they still just theoretical? Could you make them with a ion cluster beam and doing deposition after mass filtering it?

The problem is not making them but making them in enough quantities to be actually used for applications. A lot of the current research efforts are in pursuit of depositing them on a surface in our group.

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