Chemists at the University of Würzburg in Germany have, for the first time, made and isolated stable oxoboranes. These molecules, built around a triple bond between boron and oxygen, had been pursued by researchers since at least the early 1960s but were thought too unstable to study in a normal lab.
The breakthrough came by surprise. Two doctoral students, Lukas Lubczyk and Christian Markl, were separately testing reactions between a compound called a diboracumulene and common chemicals known as ketones. Both noticed unexpected orange or yellow solids forming, and these turned out to be oxoboranes.
Boron rarely forms triple bonds. The group led by Professor Holger Braunschweig made the first boron-boron triple bond in 2012 and the first neutral boron-carbon one in 2025. The new work, with computational support from Tezpur University in India, was published in Nature Chemistry.
