New papers in JACS and Chemical Science
Congratulations to Ryan Phelps, and to Luke Lewis-Borrell and coauthors for recent papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Chemical Science. Both papers report transient ultrafast spectroscopy of reactive intermediates. Ryan’s work describes studies of the mechanisms and kinetics of carbene reactions with organic solvents to form ylides and enols (Direct observation of ylide and enol intermediates formed in competition with Wolff rearrangement of photo-excited ethyl diazoacetoacetate, R. Phelps and A.J. Orr-Ewing, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 7836; DOI 10.1021/jacs.0c00752). Luke’s paper shows how multiple sequential steps in a photoredox catalysed cycle can be tracked by transient IR absorption spectroscopy (Mapping the multi-step mechanism of a photoredox catalysed atom-transfer radical polymerization reaction by direct observation of the reactive intermediates, L. Lewis-Borrell, A. Bhattacherjee, M. Sneha, et al., Chemical Science 2020, 11, 4475; DOI 10.1039/D0SC01194K).