/ News, Research, Publication

Rome wasn't built in a day

An image of the two important conformers.

Our collaboration with the Willitsch group that started 5 years ago is finally bearing fruits.

Daniel Bachmann, a former PhD student from our research group who graduated in 2015, started the practical work on this collaboration in 2015. Now five years later, the paper was finished and submitted to Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a Journal from the Royal Chemical Society. It is available as open-access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

The publication focuses on the gas-phase separation of two conformers of 2,3-dibromobuta-1,3-diene, which can be used as a model system to study how reaction mechanisms depend on conformations.

Our group's contribution was the challenging synthesis of 2,3-dibromobuta-1,3-diene as this molecule is unstable as a pure compound at room temperature since it tends to polymerise rapidly. Thanks to the elaborate purification method by Daniel Bachmann, we were able to isolate enough material to enable this study from the Willitsch group.