Paper Title
Redetermination of the Crystal Structure of Copper Selenite, Cu2SeO4
Abstract
The title compound, copper selenite, Cu2SeO4, which was usually used as a catalyst of the Kjeldahlnitrogen
determination1, was synthesized using a hydrothermal method at 443 K and its crystal structure was redetermined based on
modern CMOS (complementary metal oxide silicon) data from single-crystal X-ray diffraction at room temperature. The title
compound crystallizes in the cubic chiral space group P213 with a Flack parameter of 0.014 (7). The structure consists of
{CuO5} square pyramids, {CuO5} trigonal bipyramids and {SeO3} trigonal pyramids sharing edges to build up a threedimensional
network where the lone pairs of electrons on SeIV are accommodated in void regions in the structure, which
correlated with the previously reported structure model synthesized by transport method at higher temperature (673-723
K)(Meunier &Bertaud, 19762).All atoms in the crystal structure were located with lattice parameters, fractional coordinates
and absolute structure determined to a much higher precision. The proposed structural model was validated by bond-valencesum
calculations.
Keywords: Crystal structure, Copper(II), Metal oxide, Selenium, Selenite