Charge Transfer Complexes: Role of Water in the Dynamic Crystallization of CuTCNQ for Enhanced Redox Catalysis (TCNQ = Tetracyanoquinodimethane) (Adv. Mater. Interfaces 15/2017)

Abstract

Vipul Bansal and co‐workers overcome the challenge in fabricating large dimension Cu(7,7,8,8‐tetracyanoquinodimethane) (CuTCNQ) metal‐organic semiconductors in article number https://doi.org/10.1002/admi.201700097. The use of water‐acetonitrile bisolvent mixture instead of acetonitrile in conventional synthesis allows a dynamic control over the reaction equilibrium. This favours CuTCNQ crystallization and enables growth of highly redox active CuTCNQ structures exceeding 100 μm in length.

Molecular O2 Activation over Cu(I)-Mediated C≡N Bond for Low-Temperature CO Oxidation

“…The C, N, and Cu signals detected from these nanowires in EDS analysis suggest that the observed structures are CuTCNQ (Figure S1). The XPS spectrum (Figure F) shows BEs of Cu 2p 1/2 and 2p 3/2 peaks at 931.7 and 951.8 eV, respectively, which exhibits no evidence of satellites attributed to Cu 2+ , suggesting that the products are essentially Cu + . Meanwhile, the N 1s orbital appears with a single feature at 398.1 eV (Figure S2), indicating the presence of only one type of TCNQ in the materials .…”