Relativistic Effects in Chemistry: More Common Than You Thought

Relativistic effects can strongly influence the chemical and physical properties of heavy elements and their compounds. This influence has been noted in inorganic chemistry textbooks for a couple of decades. This review provides both traditional and new examples of these effects, including the special properties of gold, lead-acid and mercury batteries, the shapes of gold and thallium clusters, heavy-atom shifts in NMR, topological insulators, and certain specific heats.