No description available.

In organometallic chemistry, metal complexes bearing unsaturated hydrocarbon ligands are of extensive interest, especially the C3H3-M system which includes propargyl (HC¡ÝCCH2-M), allenyl (H2C=C=CH-M), and acetylide (H3CC¡ÝC-M) forms. To study the chemistry of these species on metal surfaces, we used proprargyl bromide (HC¡ÝCCH2-Br) as precursor to produce C3H3(ad) on Ag(111) under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions. The thermal reactions pathway was investigated by Temperature-Programmed Desorption (TPD), and Reflection-Absorption Infrared Spectroscopy (RAIRS). In addition, density functional theory (DFT) calculations were conducted to obtain the optimized geometry for the adsorbates, and the computed IR spectra facilitated the vibrational mode assignments. TPD spectra showed that hydrogenation products C3H4 evolved at 310 K and 475 K. However, the desorption peak at 310 K was broad, indicating that more than one species were encompassed. Besides the hydrogenation product, a coupling product C6H6 (2,4-hexadiyne) was also unveiled as part of the desorption feature at 475 K. The identity of the possible C3H4 hydrogenation products (propyne and/or allene) was not discriminable by the mass spectrometry. The problem was circumvented by using £\,£\-dimethyl-substituted propargyl chloride because this dimethyl-substituted species also resulted in hydrogenatioin products around 310 K and 475 K, respectively; and the corresponding allenic and acetylenic end-products are distinguishable by the mass spectrometry. The results indicated that the broad feature at 310 K, in fact, contained both allene (lower temperature) and propyne (higher temperature), whereas the hydrogenation product at 475 K was propyne. The RAIR spectrum at 200 K showed that all C3H3(ad) on Ag(111) readily took on the allenyl form after the C-Br bond scission. It is thus obvious that allene at 310 K was generated by adding one hydrogen to the £\-carbon of the surface allenyl. RAIR spectroscopy revealed a drastic change after annealing the surface to 250 K, where the spectrum was almost identical to that obtained from using propynyl iodide (H3C-C¡ÝC-I) as a direct source for methylacetylide (H3C-C¡ÝC-Ag). Consequently, the products of propyne and 2,4-hexadiyne could be reasoned out.

none