Keeping options open: the new and mild title reaction involving indoles selectively furnishes 1 and 2 with the aid of tert-butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP). The method represents the first example of a copper-catalyzed α arylation of α-amino carbonyl substrates leading to α-aryl α-imino and α-aryl α-oxo carbonyl compounds using a C-H oxidation strategy.

Reported herein is a ruthenium-catalyzed formal dehydrative [4 + 2] cycloaddition of enamides and alkynes, representing a mild and economic protocol for the construction of highly substituted pyridines. Notably, the features of broad substrate scope, high efficiency, good functional group tolerance, and excellent regioselectivities were observed for this reaction. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations and experiments have been carried out to understand the mechanism and regiochemistry. DFT calculations suggested that this formal dehydrative [4 + 2] reaction starts with a concerted metalation deprotonation of the enamide by the acetate group in the Ru catalyst, which generates a six-membered ruthenacycle intermediate. Then alkyne inserts into the Ru-C bond of the six-membered ruthenacycle, giving rise to an eight-membered ruthenacycle intermediate. The carbonyl group (which comes originally from the enamide substrate and is coordinated to the Ru center in the eight-membered ruthenacycle intermediate) then inserts into the Ru-C bond to give an intermediate, which produces the final pyridine product through further dehydration. Alkyne insertion step is a regio-determining step and prefers to have the aryl groups of the used alkynes stay away from the catalyst in order to avoid repulsion of aryl group with the enamide moiety in the six-membered ruthenacycle and to keep the conjugation between the aryl group and the triple C-C bond of the alkynes. Consequently, the aryl groups of the used alkynes are in the β-position of the final pyridines, and the present reaction has high regioselectivity.

In low-dimensional systems with strong electronic correlations, the application of an ultrashort laser pulse often yields novel phases that are otherwise inaccessible. The central challenge in understanding such phenomena is to determine how dimensionality and many-body correlations together govern the pathway of a non-adiabatic transition. To this end, we examine a layered compound, 1T-TiSe2, whose three-dimensional charge-density-wave (3D CDW) state also features exciton condensation due to strong electron-hole interactions. We find that photoexcitation suppresses the equilibrium 3D CDW while creating a nonequilibrium 2D CDW. Remarkably, the dimension reduction does not occur unless bound electron-hole pairs are broken. This relation suggests that excitonic correlations maintain the out-of-plane CDW coherence, settling a long-standing debate over their role in the CDW transition. Our findings demonstrate how optical manipulation of electronic interaction enables one to control the dimensionality of a broken-symmetry order, paving the way for realizing other emergent states in strongly correlated systems.

No abstract