Inside Back Cover: Double Proton Transfer Across a Table: The Formic Acid Dimer–Fluorobenzene Complex (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 49/2021)

Abstract

With fluorobenzene as a neighboring molecule, the protons of the formic acid dimer can still switch through quantum tunneling as they do in the pure formic acid dimer. Using a combined experimental and theoretical approach, Weixing Li, Denis S. Tikhonov, and Melanie Schnell reveal the following mechanism in their Communication on page 25674: The neighboring fluorobenzene does not affect the reaction barrier but decreases the tunneling rate of the double-proton transfer of the formic acid dimer. The molecular view on the environment reorganization in this proton-transfer reaction is a step towards understanding these reactions in a complex environment.