President of the Humboldt Foundation in ZIOC RAS
On June 24th 2016, Professor Helmut Schwarz, the President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, visited Zelinsky Institute. He has been engaged in the studies of gas-phase reactions between organic compounds and transition metal ions for more than 40 years. Prof. Schwarz is a highly cited organic chemist and classic of organic mass spectrometry (his h-index by WoS is 80).
He presented his concept of on-surface catalytic reaction modelling by simple reactions of isolated molecules and atoms in the gas phase in the lecture “Menage-a-Trois: Single-Atom-Catalysis, Mass Spectrometry, and Computational Chemistry” at ZIOC RAS.
Isolated metal carbene complexes generated in the gas phase and introduced in thermal reactions in single collision conditions exhibit unique reactivity in well-known processes of metathesis and cyclopropanation. The conceptual understanding of the reaction mechanisms gives an opportunity to directly experience delicate properties of reactive intermediates, i.e. metal carbene complexes, and facilitate the identification of active sites of catalysts – the so called “aristocratic atoms”.