Chemical catalysis is a vitally important process in the preparation of plastics, materials, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. Approximately 80 to 90% of the products made by the chemical industry, of which the chemicals and pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has a value of £18 billion, are reliant on catalysts.
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The researchers focused on the cheap and sustainable metal, manganese, and aimed to understand how it performs the crucial step of forming carbon-carbon bonds. Normally it is not possible to observe these steps in a catalytic reaction, as the compounds that perform them are extremely short-lived and may only be present in very small amounts. However, the team developed an innovative method to circumvent these problems and directly observe the species responsible for the key reaction steps.
Central to the success of the approach has been the application of laser facilities at the Ultra laboratory. The Ultra laser system was applied to a catalyst in order to activate it. This triggered the generation of substantial amounts of the catalyst intermediates so that their behaviour could be observed. This allowed the reactions to be studied over a wide range of timescales, from extremely short (picoseconds) to much longer (milliseconds) – equivalent to studying events occurring from one second to over three years in a single experiment.
This work was supported by academic access to the Central Laser Facility. It was also funded by Syngenta through an EPSRC iCASE award. The research has been published in Nature Catalysis: