Formamide Synthesis through Borinic Acid Catalysed Transamidation under Mild Conditions

A highly efficient and mild transamidation of amides with amines co‐catalysed by borinic acid and acetic acid has been reported. A wide range of functionalised formamides was synthesized in excellent yields, including important chiral α‐amino acid derivatives, with minor racemisation being observed. Experiments suggested that the reaction rely on a cooperative catalysis involving an enhanced boron‐derived Lewis acidity rather than an improved Brønsted acidity of acetic acid.     

Expedient BINOL derivative arylations

A dramatic improvement of our previous methodology based on a Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling to access 3,3′-disubstituted H₈-BINOLs using microwave heating is reported herein. These new conditions represent a large gain in term of atom-economy, reaction time, catalyst loading, and excess of reagents employed.     

An Easy Route to (Hetero)arylboronic Acids

An unprecedented spontaneous reactivity between diazonium salts and diboronic acid has been unveiled, leading to a versatile arylboronic acid synthesis directly from (hetero)arylamines. This fast reaction (35 min overall) tolerates a wide range of functional groups and is carried out under very mild conditions. The radical nature of the reaction mechanism has been investigated.     

Relaxation of photoexcited Na$_\mathsf{3}$F

This paper describes the spectroscopy of Na₃F both in the frequency and time domains. The photoionization efficiency curve shows two thresholds, associated to two isomers. The excited electronic states of the C_2v isomer have been probed by photodepletion spectroscopy, and the results are used to analyze a time-resolved study of photoexcited Na₃F, probed by photoionization. The pump-probe signal clearly shows damped oscillations, the period of which is fitted to fs, close to twice the previously measured bending mode of Na₂F [1], while the relaxation time is fs.Received: 31 October 2003, Published online: 6 January 2004PACS: 36.40.Qv Stability and fragmentation of clusters - 33.50.-j Fluorescence and phosphorescence; radiationless transitions, quenching (intersystem crossing, internal conversion)     

Threshold photoelectron study of naphthalene, anthracene, pyrene, 1,2-dihydronaphthalene, and 9,10-dihydroanthracene

Threshold photoelectron spectra (TPESs) were obtained for naphthalene, anthracene, pyrene, 1,2-dihydronaphthalene, and 9,10-dihydroanthracene using imaging photoelectron photoion coincidence spectroscopy, from threshold to a photon energy of ～20 eV. Outer valence Green's function calculations at the OVGF∕cc-pVTZ level of theory were used to assign molecular orbitals to the observed TPES features. There is generally good agreement between the predicted and observed bands. Threshold regions for each molecule exhibit vibrational structure which is readily assigned based on previous PES studies. While the measured adiabatic ionization energies (IE(a)) for naphthalene, anthracene, and pyrene are in good agreement with previous works, new values are reported for the two dihydro species (1,2-dihydronaphthalene, 8.010 ± 0.010 eV and 9,10-dihydroanthracene, 8.335 ± 0.010 eV). A comparison is also made with the G3∕∕B3LYP composite method, which consistently overestimates the IE values by 0.06-0.09 eV. The double ionization energies for anthracene and pyrene have been measured to be 19.3 ± 0.2 and 19.8 ± 0.2 eV, respectively.     

Time-resolved predissociation of the vibrationless level of the B state of CH3I

The predissociation dynamics of the vibrationless level of the first Rydberg 6s (B (1)E) state of CH(3)I has been studied by femtosecond-resolved velocity map imaging of both the CH(3) and I photofragments. The kinetic energy distributions of the two fragments have been recorded as a function of the pump-probe delay, and as a function of excitation within the umbrella and stretching vibrational modes of the CH(3) fragment. These observations are made by using (2 + 1) Resonant Enhanced MultiPhoton Ionization (REMPI) via the state of CH(3) to detect specific vibrational levels of CH(3). The vibrational branching fractions of the CH(3) are recovered by using the individual vibrationally state-selected CH(3) distributions to fit the kinetic energy distribution obtained by using nonresonant multiphoton ionization of either the I or the CH(3) fragment. The angular distributions and rise times of the two fragments differ significantly. These observations can be rationalized through a consideration of the alignment of the CH(3) fragment and the effect of this alignment on its detection efficiency. Two additional dissociation channels are detected: one associated with Rydberg states near 9.2 eV that were observed previously in photoelectron studies, and one associated with photodissociation of the parent cation around 15 eV.     

Optimal uncertainty size in distributionally robust inverse covariance estimation

In a recent paper, Nguyen et al. (2018) built a distributionally robust estimator for the precision matrix of the Gaussian distribution. The distributional uncertainty size is a key ingredient in the construction of this estimator. We develop a statistical theory which shows how to optimally choose the uncertainty size to minimize the associated Stein loss. Surprisingly, rather than the expected canonical square-root scaling rate, the optimal uncertainty size scales linearly with the sample size.