Homogeneous gold catalysis has reached an extraordinary level of popularity within organic synthesis as a fundamental tool in the nucleophilic reactions of isolated π-systems, C-H activation, cross-couplings, photocatalysis and enantioselective transformations. Together with the ligand...
Highlights with ‘inorganic chemistry’
High-resolution X-ray absorption spectroscopy of iron carbonyl complexes
X-ray spectroscopy has become a commonly used tool to probe to structure of transition metal complexes, allowing for element-specific measurements. Conventional X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) masurement transmission like UV-Vis, however this methodology is subject to...
Intramolecular 6-electron photo-redox reactions
Oxidative addition and reductive elimination reactions of small molecules possessing high-order bonds (e.g. N2, O2, NO+) is of fundamental interest in transition metal chemistry. As a means to study the mechanism and intermediates of such...
Growth Mechanism of Small Endohedral Metallofullerenes
In two recent combined experimental and computational studies, the optimal cage for each endohedral metallofullerene within the families Ti@C2n and Ca@C2n has been identified and key aspects of the intriguing growth mechanisms of fullerenes were unravelled....
Insights into the components of MAO mixtures
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...
Optical Properties of Silver and Gold Nanoparticles
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....
Reactive cluster model of metallic glasses
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...
Catalytic oxygenation by Ruthenium Polyoxometalates
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...
Gold-Carbon Bonding in Gold-Alkynyl Complexes
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...
Stable GaX2, InX2 and TlX2 radicals
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....