Zirconium(II) hydride, ZrH₂ is a molecular

chemical compound A chemical compound is a chemical substance composed of many identical molecules (or molecular entities) containing atoms from more than one chemical element held together by chemical bonds. A molecule consisting of atoms of only one element ...

which has been prepared by laser ablation and isolated at low temperature. Zirconium(II) hydride has repeatedly been the subject of

Dirac Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety of ...

– Hartree–Fock relativistic calculation studies, which investigate the stabilities, geometries, and relative energies of hydrides of the formula MH₄, MH₃, MH₂, or MH. Zirconium(II) hydride has a dihedral (C_2v) structure. In zirconium(II) hydride, the formal

oxidation state In chemistry, the oxidation state, or oxidation number, is the hypothetical charge of an atom if all of its bonds to different atoms were fully ionic. It describes the degree of oxidation (loss of electrons) of an atom in a chemical compound. C ...

s of hydrogen and zirconium are −1 and +2, respectively, because the electronegativity of zirconium is lower than that of hydrogen. The stability of metal hydrides with the formula MH₂ (M = Ti-Hf) decreases as the atomic number increases.

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