Quick and clean chemical reactions limiting the usage of toxic or hazardous reactants and solvents, enabled by innovative single-atom catalysts. A team of researchers from the Materials Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Department (Politecnico di Milano) and the Quantum Chemistry Laboratory at the Department of Materials Science (University of Milano-Bicocca) reached this goal. Dr. Giovanni Di Liberto, Prof. Sergio Tosoni and Prof. Gianfranco Pacchioni took side in this research joining experiments and theoretical modelling, permitting to shed light on the relationship between the coordination of the metal atom and its catalytic performance.
The results were recently published on ACS Catalysis, one of the best scientific journal in the field of catalysis (Impact factor 13.084 - Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics, 2020) in a paper entitled “Azide-Alkyne Click Chemistry Over a Heterogeneous Copper-Based Single-Atom Catalyst” (doi: 10.1021/acscatal.1c05610).