Electric-Field Catalysis of Diels–Alder Reactions
Bing-Ru Shao, Shen-Yi Guo, Miguel Paraja, Qing-Xia Zhang, Augustina Jozeliu̅naitė, Naomi Sakai, Stefan Matile · 2026
Read Electric-Field Catalysis of Diels–Alder Reactions by Bing-Ru Shao, Shen-Yi Guo, Miguel Paraja, Qing-Xia Zhang, Augustina Jozeliu̅naitė, Naomi Sakai, Stefan Matile (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13523502.txt.
Description
Bing-Ru Shao and colleagues report a 2026 chemistry study on catalyzing the Diels-Alder reaction with externally applied electric fields. The Diels-Alder reaction, a workhorse for building ring structures, has long been the test case for electric-field catalysis. Practical use under normal synthesis conditions had remained out of reach, despite elegant model systems and theory.
Working in microfluidic capacitors, the team assembled functional Helmholtz layers, thin charged layers at a surface, that translate applied voltage into strong local fields. Yields climbed in a nonlinear way from zero to 90 percent as voltage rose. Layers built from chiral, or handed, charged molecules also steered product handedness, reaching 31 percent enantiomeric excess at very low catalyst loading. The authors present chiral layers as both catalyst and sole source of handedness.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Bing-Ru Shao, Shen-Yi Guo, Miguel Paraja, Qing-Xia Zhang, Augustina Jozeliu̅naitė, Naomi Sakai, Stefan Matile |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 52 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |