Dr. Tonya Vitova, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her project "The Actinide Bond", in which she uses innovative spectroscopic methods to investigate actinide compounds in order to better understand the environmental behavior of such elements, among other things.
The early actinides, i.e. the chemical elements that follow one another in the periodic table from thorium to curium, pose major challenges for basic research in physics and chemistry: Understanding the electron structure and binding behavior of these radioactive elements enables, among other things, the development of advanced pharmaceutical agents for the targeted treatment of cancer as well as the development of new remediation methods for radioactively contaminated areas and an improved understanding of the behavior of actinoids in the environment.
The aim of the work is to find a connection between the covalency and the strength of the chemical binding of actinoids in gaseous, liquid and solid materials. To this end, the researcher combines X-ray spectroscopic methods based on synchrotron radiation with quantum chemical calculations in order to develop methods for selecting suitable actinide materials or complexes for various applications.
