Congratulations to Yonglong Li for his paper accepted by Angew!
The authors synthesized a bifunctional gold-nickel composite nanostructure by self-assembly method (many small-particle nickel nanoparticles were assembled on the surface of large-particle gold nanoparticles). Compared with the previous complicated method for preparing bifunctional nanoparticles, this strategy has three advantages: firstly, the method is simple, and the synthesis is one step; the second is that the yield is close to 100%; the third is high-dose synthesis. Subsequently, the authors characterized the in situ SERS to characterize the C-C coupling reaction of mercaptobenzene on the surface of nickel nanoparticles to form mercaptobiphenyl.Surprisingly, by in situ SERS, the authors found that the CC coupling reaction, which was originally thought to be Ullmann self-coupling, was actually achieved by dehalogenation of thiol bromide to phenylthiol, which was then cross coupling with thiol bromide. In situ SERS detection played a key role in this work, and the authors found a new class of heterogeneous C-C coupled photocatalysts.
