Ricerc@Sapienza

Heterogeneous phase catalysis has attracted scientific community in the last few decades because, supporting chiral catalysts on solid supports, it is possible to easily recover and reuse them for several catalytic cycles. Especially the use of magnetic nanoparticles is highly advantageous, both for their high dispersibility in organic solvents that the simple and non-expensive recovery by magnetic decantation. Our attention has been focused on the modification of known efficient chiral ligands’ structure, in order to let them be anchorable on Fe3O4@SiO2 nanoparticles.

Even though homogeneous phase asymmetric catalysis allows to obtain optical active products with high yields and enantiomeric excesses, it is generally associated with a difficult and expensive recovery of the catalyst from the reaction mixture. Therefore, in the last few decades it has grown the interest in heterogeneous phase catalysis using nanoparticles as solid supports, which can provide both advantages of homogeneous and heterogeneous phase catalysis, namely, simple recovery and high catalytic activity.