The electronic and steric properties of tailored cyclopentadienyl (Cp) ligands are powerful handles to modulate the catalytic properties of their metal complexes. This requires the individual preparation, purification and storage of each ligand/metal combi ...

2017

Lattice, spin and orbital excitations in selected transition metal oxides : a resonant inelastic x-ray scattering investigation

Sara Fatale

Transition metal compounds represent a unique class of solids characterized by a surprising richness of physical properties. They display many phenomena and represent the main area of interest for the research on strongly correlated materials. Many novel i ...

EPFL2017

Remarkable enhancement of bacterial inactivation in wastewater through promotion of solar photo-Fenton at near-neutral pH by natural organic acids

César Pulgarin, Stefanos Giannakis

In this work, the near-neutral photo-Fenton process, as a means of wastewater disinfection, was enhanced by the addition of Organic Acids (OAs), namely citric, ascorbic, tartaric and caffeic acid. The addition of OAs exhibited significant bacterial inactiv ...

Elsevier2017

A Functional Model of [Fe]-Hydrogenase

Rosario Scopelliti, Xile Hu, Matthew Wodrich, Tao Xu, Simona Mazza

[Fe]-Hydrogenase catalyzes the hydrogenation of a biological substrate via the heterolytic splitting of molecular hydrogen. While many synthetic models of [Fe]-hydrogenase have been prepared, none yet are capable of activating H-2 on their own. Here, we re ...

American Chemical Society2016

Fe N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes as Promising Photosensitizers

Yizhu Liu

The photophysics and photochemistry of transition metal complexes (TMCs) has long been a hot field of interdisciplinary research. Rich metal-based redox processes, together with a high variety in electronic configurations and excited-state dynamics, have r ...

American Chemical Society2016

Organocatalysis: Fundamentals and Comparisons to Metal and Enzyme Catalysis

Pierre Vogel

Catalysis fulfills the promise that high-yielding chemical transformations will require little energy and produce no toxic waste. This message is carried by the study of the evolution of molecular catalysis of some of the most important reactions in organi ...

2016

Access to Chiral Cyclopentane Scaffolds by Enantioselective Nickel-Catalyzed Annulations

Joachim Sven Ernst Ahlin

The cyclopentane scaffold has attracted much attention due to its ubiquity in numerous bioactive natural products such as prostaglandins and polyquinanes. However, despite a plethora of available procedures to access this motif, a lack of methods that riva ...

EPFL2016

Chiral Cyclopentadienyls: Enabling Ligands for Asymmetric Rh(III)-Catalyzed C-H Functionalizations

Nicolai Cramer, Baihua Ye

Transition-metal catalyzed C-H functionalizations became a complementary and efficient bond-forming strategy over the past decade. In this respect, Cp*Rh(III) complexes have emerged as powerful catalysts for a broad spectrum of reactions giving access to s ...

American Chemical Society2015

Chiral Cyclopentadienyl Rh(III)-Complexes for Asymmetric C-H Functionalizations

Baihua Ye

Pentamethylcyclopentadienyl (Cp*) based transition-metal-catalyzed C-H functionalization has become an important synthetic tool for the construction of molecular complexity from simple starting materials. Despite their high potential, the corresponding asy ...

EPFL2015

Time-resolved X-ray and Optical Studies of Metalloproteins and Iridium Complexes

Mahsa Silatani

A wide variety of physicochemical processes at a molecular level, in particular charge or energy transfer, electronic and vibrational relaxation, are at the origin of biological functionality of proteins and organometallic compounds. The work reported in t ...

EPFL2015