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Combined N-heterocyclic carbene and photoredox-catalysed strategies for the acylation of arenes offer regiocontrol that is complementary to Lewis-acid-mediated Friedel–Crafts approaches.
Direct synthesis of nitric acid from nitrogen and oxygen is attractive but is challenging under mild conditions. Now, direct conversion of air to nitric acid is achieved under mild conditions via a hydroxyl-radical-mediated hetero-homogeneous electrochemical route at the cathode.
A chemical dedoping technique is introduced to mitigate excessive electron doping in molecular cation intercalated MoS2, producing a stable bulk monolayer material with monolayer-like optical properties but a much larger optical cross-section.
A kinetically controlled solution-phase synthesis produces nanoparticles of defined shape and multimetallic surface composition for catalytic applications.
The synthesis of polycyclic conjugated hydrocarbons with antiaromatic moieties is realized by the thermal rearrangement of dibromomethylene-functionalized molecular precursors on a hot Au(111) metal surface.
The reversible deactivation process in polymerization using chain-end hydrogen atoms remains underexplored and difficult to control. Now, deprotonation–protonation equilibrium-driven C(sp3)–H alkylation polymerization of cyclopropanes is reported using the cooperative catalysis of an organic base and a metal salt to control the polymerization.
Shape-controlled multimetallic nanoparticles remain elusive due to large existing miscibility gaps. Now, a low-temperature (≤80 °C) non-equilibrium synthesis of nanosurface alloys with tunable size, shape and composition is reported. The nanosurface alloys can be used as selective and phase-stable CO2 reduction electrocatalysts.
Polymetallic rings are formed via the collision-induced dissociation of larger complexes. Ion mobility mass spectrometry can be used to determine whether the formed polymetallic complexes are cyclic or acyclic.
A hybrid carbon nanotube/molecular catalyst achieves highly selective electrochemical conversion of CO to methanol via mechanistic-guided optimizations.
Birgit Esser, Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at Ulm University, talks to Nature Synthesis about the challenges of synthesizing conjugated nanohoops and other aromatic systems.
The electroreduction of CO to methanol catalysed by supported cobalt phthalocyanine molecules is hindered by low selectivity and poor mechanistic understanding. Here a mechanism-guided reaction based on systematic kinetic studies is used to achieve an improved methanol Faradaic efficiency of roughly 85%.
Renana Gershoni-Poranne, Branco Weiss fellow and assistant professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, talks to Nature Synthesis about probing aromatic molecules with computational tools.