Achievement

As part of a program directed toward the investigation of novel boron-containing aromatics for materials applications, the Shih-Yuan Liu group, including IGERT fellow Adam Marwitz, prepared the simplest member of the family of aromatic six-membered BN heterocycles, 1,2-dihydro-1,2-azaborine. This molecule is isoelectronic and isostructural with benzene, the quintessential aromatic moleucule, and thus, is of fundamental importance in the chemistry of self-assembled and conjugated materials. In an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort with a computational expert, we determined that the behavior and properties of 1,2-dihydro-1,2-azaborine is consistent with those predicted by theory. This work was published in Angewandte Chemie, and it received significant publicity being highlighted in Chemical Engineering News (January 5, 2009, p 11), Nature (2009, Vol. 457, p 239), and ACS Noteworthy Chemistry (February 23, 2009).