Boron helps to gently couple dinitrogen

Abstract

Dinitrogen tends to be a loner. Extreme conditions, such as intense radiation in the ionosphere, are needed to coerce two or more N2 molecules to form chains. Various pharmaceuticals and explosives made by humans contain three- and four-atom nitrogen chains. To make these compounds, chemists have to use an indirect route. They first split dinitrogen through a high-temperature and high-pressure industrial process to produce ammonia and amines. Then they stitch together those N1 compounds into the nitrogen chains. A new study describes a direct and gentle way to make compounds with nitrogen chains using dinitrogen. Marc-André Légaré and Holger Braunschweig of Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg and coworkers report that an organoboron compound can stitch together two N2 molecules under near-ambient conditions to form a complex in which an N4 chain bridges two boron moieties (Science 2019, DOI: 10.1126/science.aav9593). The study follows work published last year by the Würzburg group in which