Beyond some reminisces about Susan, the large and diverse varieties of unprecedented ternary intermetallic phases that have been obtained recently from alkali- or alkaline-earth metals, gold, and a post-transition metal or metalloids will be illustrated. These are all more-or-less distinctive, evidently because of (a) the particularly low total valence electron counts in such compounds, 1.4 to ~2.2 electrons per atom, (b) the subsequent high coordination numbers and highly delocalized bonding among the atoms, giving rise to strong dependencies of structure on atom sizes, (c) the strong, relativistically-enhanced 5d, 6s bonding by gold, (d) the high absolute (Mulliken) electronegativity of gold atoms, and (e) the polar characteristics of these compounds. The presentation will be highly pictorial.

Proliferation of ternary gold intermetallics with low electron counts: Show and tell

245th National Meeting (2013)

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