Credit: Image courtesy of Carter W. Abney, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
A new synergistic extraction system composed of a preorganized organic ligand, 2,9-bis(triazine)-1,10-phenanthroline, dissolved in an ionic liquid efficiently and selectively separated americium(III) from europium(III). The team determined the structure of the extracted complex, right, through application of computational modeling and validated by X-ray absorption spectroscopy.