Methylaluminoxane (MAO) is one of the most commonly utilized co-catalysts in the single-site production of polyolefins catalyzed by metallocenes. However, its exact structure has eluded experimental characterization because of the dynamic equilibrium between various species...
In two recent papers, researchers from Trieste and Pisa studied the optical properties of silver and gold nanoparticles. The fundamental study on silver nanoshells showed that plasmonic features emerge at shells as small as 92 atoms....
Metallic glasses are still poorly understood, especially the lack of long-range order. In a bottom-up approach, researchers from the Colorado School of Mines have studied the chemical interactions between clusters underlying the acrystalline behavior of...
The catalytic oxydation of DMSO has been established with ruthenium polyoxometalates (POMs). The catalytic cycle has been revealed through a combination of experiments and theory, with the key intermediate established by relativistic DFT calculations as a POM-dimer...
Researchers from Brown University and Tsinghua University investigated and analyzed the chemical bonding between gold and carbon in gold-alkynyl complexes combining photoelectron spectroscopy and relativistic quantum chemical calculations. The importance of this work for understanding...
Group 13 M(II) species are very rare and unstable, yet may well be key electron transfer intermediates. Employing bulky boryl ligands, thermally stable M(boryl)2 complexes (M=Ga,In,Tl) have been isolated and characterized for the first time....
In a paper with collaborators from Mexico, Belgium, Switzerland, and the US, the structural, electronic and chiroptical properties of BINAS-substituted A-Au38(SCH3)24 have been studied with scalar-relativistic TDDFT. R-BINAS preferentially adsorbs by bridging two vicinal dimer...
In a cover-featured article, Lando Wolters and Matthias Bickelhaupt have analyzed the bonding mechanism in a series of d10 transition metal complexes ML2 with ADF. There is a subtle interplay between interligand steric (Pauli) repulsion...
DFT predictions by Jochen Autschbach helped to characterize a long sought-after dirhodium donor-acceptor carbene, an important reaction intermediate in various organic transformations. The NMR modules in ADF, by Jochen and others, was used to calculate the...
Researchers from PNNL have, for the first time, isolated and characterized two agostic isomers (‘agostomers’). Isomers of a cationic Mo piano stool complex, important intermediates in catalytic hydrogenation, have been separated by crystallization and can...