A planar per-borylated digermene.

A tetraboryl digermene synthesized by the reaction between a dianionic digermanide nucleophile and a boron halide electrophile is dimeric both in the solid state and in hydrocarbon solution. It features both a planar 'alkene-like' geometry for the Ge 2 B 4 core, and an exceptionally short GeGe double bond. These structural features are consistent with the known electronic properties of the boryl group, and with lowest energy ( in silico ) fragmentation into two triplet bis(boryl)germylene fragments.