Aryl–Aryl Covalent Coupling on Rutile TiO2 Surfaces

Abstract

In recent years, enormous progress has been made in developing bottom-up strategies based on the polymerization of specially designed building blocks di-rectly on a supporting surface. So far, selected noble metals have been mostly used as substrates for such on-surface chemical reactions. For the sake of practical appli-cations the semiconductor surfaces clearly represent much more attractive plat-forms. Especially transition metal oxides exhibiting advantageous optical as well as photo- and electrochemical properties seem to be especially interesting. In this chapter we describe the strategies for thermally triggered on-surface covalent coupling of aryl halides performed directly on rutile titanium dioxide surfaces. We focus our work on important parameters that need to be considered for understanding and optimization of the polymerization reactions on this model transition metal oxide system.