In the morning of December 25, the Ministry of Education announced "2013 Top 10 Advances in Science and Technology of Universities in China" in which the project of "Transition metals induced mutation of anti-aromaticity to aromaticy" led by Prof. Haiping Xia was one of it. The other nine awardees were from Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Harbin Institute of Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University and Yanshan University.

It took Prof. Xia’s group four years to have such achievements as the first synthesized and isolated metallapentalyne, a brand-new aromatic species, by incorporating a transition metal fragment into an anti-aromatic ring. The metallapentalyne is exceptionally stable and exhibits unusual optical properties such as near-infrared photoluminescence with particularly large Stokes shifts (> 300 nm), long lifetime and aggregation-induced enhancement. All these optical properties are completely different from the classical organic aromatic compounds, indicating promising applications in optoelectronic materials and bio-medical field. In addition, its strong absorption in the UV-visible region suggested potential applications in solar energy.

Another scientific breakthrough of this project is that the new species challenges the limit of a chemical bond and refreshes the world record of a bond angle at the carbyne carbon. "The ideal value of a bond angle at a carbyne carbon should be 180°. As it is less than 150°, one degree decreasing requires tremendous energy to overcome the ring strain. Our work demonstrated that the bond angle can be lowered to 129.5° that is 17° compressed compared to the previous record of 147 ° reported in Science, 2002.  This represents a scientific breakthrough." said Prof. Xia.

The "Top 10 Advances in Science and Technology of Universities in China" was initiated in 1998 and has been held once a year since then. This competition has played an important role in promoting the whole level of science and technology in universities and improving innovative capability of the universities, thus leading to great influences on both the academia and industries.

The previous project led by Prof. Shigang Sun, "Tetrahexahedral platinum nanocrystals catalyst", had ever been awarded in 2007.

Source: http://www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s5987/201312/161161.html