There is a chemical element applied for decades that turned out to never exist

A very important factor, the foundation for many studies, eventually turned out to have never existed.

At the end of January 2018, the magazine Chemical Communications published a very strange and interesting study. Accordingly, research has turned a chemical that has been used a lot in decades to become an unknown little thing.

More precisely, that chemical has never existed , and means that many studies that have been done on that "ghost chemical" have become worthless.

Chemicals that seemed important turned out to have never existed.

Specifically, the study was carried out by experts from Western Australia University and Murdoch University (Australia), and it came to them by accident. At that time, two expert groups were working on a project to treat mercury from refineries with sulfide solution (S2-) .

Sounds too reasonable, right? But this is not a simple question, because the oil refining industry has sought to answer it for years. Overall, this is a project that requires very deep expertise in chemistry, as well as using many variations of sulfur.

During the study, they must focus on S2- ion . This ion seems to be determined to exist in many forms, and experts have to find experimental evidence of its existence in solution.

They use complex sulfur-related mixtures, dissolve them in super-concentrated solutions, and then place them in the spectrometer. This is a device that uses lasers to excite molecules, then uses scattered light to identify specific molecules that exist in the solution.

Symbol of sulfide.

But oddly enough, no matter how hard they tried, they still couldn't find the shadow of the S2-ion in that solution.

"There is no evidence of any experimental evidence that this ion exists in solution," said study author Peter May from Murdoch University.

According to May, he said that even though it cannot prove S2, it does not exist, but there is no evidence that it exists at all. It's like a "ghost" ion.

More importantly, sulfide is a very important chemical element, appearing in every textbook , all known human chemistry platforms. According to May, this is where science needs to be more serious, not continuing to conduct studies based on the existence of sulfide. Even in a negative way, all previous studies could be erased, because they were wrong.