News




June 2018:  A collaborative proposal  “EXPLORATION OF RADIAL CONJUGATION PATHWAYS IN PI-ELECTRON MATERIALS” has been recommended for funding from the US Department of Energy. The funding is to support a collaboration between two synthetic chemists J.D. Tovar (the lead PI at Johns Hopkins), Ramesh Justi (U. Oregon) as a theorist (Kertesz). The funding will support us to engineer extreme degrees of pi-electron delocalization into molecular and polymeric frameworks by combination of linear and radial pi-conjugation that will be broadly applicable to energy transport processes in organic-based electronic materials.  Radial conjugation refers to unusual pi-conjugation in nanohoop molecules, such as in cyclo-p-phenylenes.



June 2017: Troy Zhongyu Mou's paper on triangularly shaped graphene flakes  (triangulenes)  showed that these multi-radical polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules can form multiple pancake bonds. See: “Pancake bond orders: A study of a series of triangulenes”, Zhongyu Mou, Miklos Kertesz, Angew. Chem. Internat. Ed. 2017. Accepted online:
The paper has been selected and invited for a cover. The paper will appear in the Festschrift in honor of Roald Hoffmann's 80th birthday.



May 2017: Shota's paper has been selected as "Hot Paper" by the editors of the journal, see "Intramolecular Pancake‐bonding in Helical Structures", Takamuku, S.; Nakano, M.; Kertesz, M., Chemistry-A European Journal. 2017, 23, 7474-7482. Shota Takamuku's three months visit from Prof. Nakano's lab was a productive experience. The paper was also highlighted and selected for cover. See this link.



February 2017: SYNFACTS has highlighted recent collaborative work of the Kertesz group done with Prof. J. Casado (Malaga, Spain) and Prof. K. Takimiya (Hiroshima, Japan). The authors, according to SYNFACTS, introduced a novel responsive soft material that involves a molecular structure change during dimerization and polymerization in a reversible manner. The weak covalent-like supramolecular bond formation is affected by and can be manipulated by external stimuli such as temperature, concentration and pressure. The submolecular reasons for the large observed shift in the absorption bands is due to a change between the aromatic and quinonoiod structures. Ph. D. candidate Lili Qiu participated in this collaborative research. SYNFACTS highlights significant progress in synthetic organic chemistry. The work was reported in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.



April, 2016: A recent article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by graduate student Troy Zhongyu Mou with Professor Miklos Kertesz in this department reported their collaborative work with Professor Takashi Kubo and his graduate student Kazuyuki Uchida from the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University in Japan. Based on the Editor’s recommendation this article has been chosen to be highlighted in a JACS Spotlight, titled “Radical Bonding Opens Window to Molecular Electronics”, see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.6b03587.

As the Spotlight describes, this work “…present the first in-depth examination of a phenalenyl radical derivative with fluxional—or rapidly changing—electron arrangement and bonding.

Theoretical and experimental investigations reveal competing, nearly energy equivalent electron bonding configurations, which lead to continuous bond dissociation and re-formation. Much work has focused on understanding the basis for the unusual behavior observed in these materials, but until now researchers have not been able to expose and measure the relative preferences of competing bonding pathways. This work helps to break through a fundamental barrier to the practical use of these materials as components in devices that require unusual electronic, optical, and magnetic properties.” 

January 2014: ChemPhysChem, a European journal of Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics has selected as a Very Important Paper the contribution from the Kertesz group “Study of the Diradicaloid Character in a Prototypical Pancake Bonded Dimer: The Stacked Tetracyanoethylene (TCNE) Anion Dimer and the Neutral K2TCNE2 Complex” by postdoc  Zhong-hua Cui and our international collaborators Hans Lischka, Thomas Mueller, Felix Plasser. See: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1439-7641/homepage/2267_vip.html ). The work is based on high level multi-reference average quadratic coupled cluster (MR-AQCC) calculations.