Posts Tagged ‘G/RT’

Chemistry in an attosecond.

Friday, November 4th, 2011

An attosecond is 10-18s. The chemistry that takes place on this timescale is called electron dynamics. For example, it is the time taken for an electron to traverse the 1s orbit in a hydrogen atom. And chemists are starting to manipulate electrons (and hence chemistry) on this timescale; for example a recent article (DOI: 10.1021/ja206193t) describes how to control the electrons in benzene using attosecond laser pulses.

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Rate enhancement of the Diels-Alder reaction inside a cavity

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Reactions in cavities can adopt quite different characteristics from those in solvents. Thus first example of the catalysis of the Diels-Alder reaction inside an organic scaffold was reported by Endo, Koike, Sawaki, Hayashida, Masuda, and Aoyama[1], where the reaction shown below is speeded up very greatly in the presence of a crystalline lattice of the anthracene derivative shown below.

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References

  1. K. Endo, T. Koike, T. Sawaki, O. Hayashida, H. Masuda, and Y. Aoyama, "Catalysis by Organic Solids. Stereoselective Dielsāˆ’Alder Reactions Promoted by Microporous Molecular Crystals Having an Extensive Hydrogen-Bonded Network", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 119, pp. 4117-4122, 1997. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja964198s