A little frustration goes a long way

Abstract

Chemists have long known that catalytic Lewis acidic and Lewis basic sites on metal and metal oxide surfaces help spark a range of reactions that are important in industrial chemical and fuel production. Yet researchers still have no general theory available to predict all the mechanistic nuances of how these electron-deficient and electron-rich sites lead to that reactivity. As a case in point, a research team led by nanochemistry specialist Geoffrey A. Ozin and computational materials engineer Chandra Veer Singh of the University of Toronto has recently uncovered a previously overlooked phenomenon involving cooperative acid-base reactivity on the surface of the solid photocatalyst indium oxide. In a set of structural and kinetic studies, the researchers show that closely situated Lewis acidic and basic sites on the solid catalyst act like solution-based molecular systems known as frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs). Ozin, Singh, and their colleagues say this heterogeneous surface analog of