The single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis performed on the BBIG-CrO
4 reveals its crystalline structure which confirms our initial hypothesis. In the structure of BBIG-CrO
4 (
Fig. 1a), a planar bis(iminoguanidinium) cation crystallizes with a chromate anion in term of 1:1 complex and two water molecules generated from the hydration. The chemical component of a BBIG-CrO
4 unit cell is 4 (BBIG(CrO
4)(H
2O)
2). Here two types of BBIG cations can be detected; one is perfectly planar while the other type is slightly bent. These BBIG cations are stacked in an antiparallel fashion in an ABAB pattern in the crystal, with a mean interplanar distance of 3.44 Å (
Fig. 1b). Interestingly, the CrO
42- anions always appear in pairs in the BBIG-CrO
4 crystal. Each CrO
42- pair is bridged by 8 OH (water) O(CrO
42-)hydrogen bonds (HBs) assisted by 4 water molecules, forming a unique (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 cluster, as shown in
Fig. 1c. We performed Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations [
26-
34] to investigate the stability of an isolated (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 cluster. If the four water molecules were removed from the cluster, the calculated interaction energy between the two CrO
42- anions (
EintCr-Cr) is 228.00 kcal/mol, showing strong repulsion. The calculated total binding energy (
Ebcluster) of the whole cluster is 88.70 kcal/mol. That indicates that the OH (water)···O(CrO
42-) hydrogen bonding interactions and the electrostatic shielding effects of water molecules can greatly weaken the anion-anion repulsion, but not be enough to stabilize an isolated cluster. Hence, it can be concluded that the cationic BBIG ligands play a crucial role in stabilizing (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 clusters in BBIG-CrO
4 crystal. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis combining with DFT geometry optimization show that, in the BBIG-CrO
4 crystal, each (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 cluster is actually encapsulated into a 20-fold NH···O HBs network, including 14 NH···O(CrO
42-)and 6 NH···O(H
2O) which provided by the surrounding twelve guanidine groups, as shown in
Fig. 1d (The details of the hydrogen bonding in the BBIG-CrO
4 crystal can be found in Table S3 in Supporting information). For each (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 cluster, such a super-dense HBs network yields a binding energy (
EbL-C) of 153.93 kcal/mol. This binding energy is obviously larger than 20 conventional HBs (about 2-5 kcal/mol per one conventional HB), mainly because of the strong electrostatic attractions between the cationic BBIG
2+ ligands and the anionic CrO
42-. DFT calculations show that the whole electron density surface of the BBIG molecule possesses positive electrostatic potential (ESP), since it has two positive charges formally (
Fig. 1e). Moreover, the positive ESPs are mainly distributed around the two guanidine groups and three positive ESP maxima can be found around each guanidine group. Therefore, all the five –NH terminals can be served as HBs donors. On the contrary, the CrO
42- molecule has large negative ESPs on its electron density surface (
Fig. 1f). Hence, the dense charge-assisted HBs network greatly stabilizes the (CrO
42-)
2(H
2O)
4 clusters in the crystal [
35,
36]. Note that CrO
42- anions are extremely hydrophilic in water with a high solvation energy (958 kJ/mol), and therefore, it is difficult to transfer them to another phase by desolvation [
37]. However, owing to the positive charge of the BBIG ligands and tight hydrogen bonds in the BBIG-CrO
4 crystal, CrO
42- anions are inclined to transfer from aqueous solutions to solid phase by charge-assisted hydrogen bonding interaction.