Metal-free atom transfer radical polymerization.

By Nicolas J. Treat, H. Sprafke, J. W. Kramer, Paul G. Clark, Bryan E. Barton, Javier Read de Alaniz, B. Fors, C. Hawker. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2014

758 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Overcoming the challenge of metal contamination in traditional ATRP systems, a metal-free ATRP process, mediated by light and catalyzed by an organic-based photoredox catalyst, is reported. Polymerization of vinyl monomers are efficiently activated and deactivated with light leading to excellent control over the molecular weight, polydispersity, and chain ends of the resulting polymers. Significantly, block copolymer formation was facile and could be combined with other controlled radical processes leading to structural and synthetic versatility. We believe that these new organic-based photoredox catalysts will enable new applications for controlled radical polymerizations and also be of further value in both small molecule and polymer chemistry.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/263fb4aaf4cefd3aa41d934c473cd526006b226a

Citations in the corpus

• Organocatalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization driven by visible light (2016, neutral): “9 3 [1000]:[20]:[1] 8 78.”
• Photomediated controlled radical polymerization (2016, neutral): “11 organocatalyzed (O) or photoinduced electron transfer (PET) ATRP, was reported using alkyl bromide as ATRP initiator.[26, 27] A similar method using alkyl iodides with various organic catalysts was also reported to provide well-defined polymers.”