A nice gift under the Christmas tree 😉 – a research article in the prestigious Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers journal has just been published. This is our probably last paper in 2021. It is a great example of how the unexpected outcome of your experiments may give rise to an interesting paper that is the result of an excellent cooperation of specialists in synthetic, analytic and crystallographic chemistry. We encourage You to read it.

In our paper, we disclose an unexpected Si-O-Si cage reorganization that was observed during the standard hydrolytic condensation procedure of tetrasilanol double-decker silsesquioxane (DDSQ) with respective mono- and di-chlorosilanes. We tried to look deeper in the process to find out its possible mechanism and we used not only NMR but also MALDI and ESI MS analysis along with the thorough verification of crystallographic structures (11 examples) of obtained silsesquioxanes. The obtained compounds were also verified in terms of their thermal stability. Also, we revealed the unusual behaviour of vinyl-substituted DDSQs in the silylative coupling reaction.

Rzonsowska, K. Mituła, J. Duszczak, M. Kasperkowiak, R. Januszewski, A. Grześkiewicz, M. Kubicki, D. Głowacka, B. Dudziec
Unexpected and frustrating transformations of double-decker silsesquioxanes
Inorg. Chem. Front. 2021, (accepted) DOI: 10.1039/d1qi01363g