Researchers have developed a strategy to disentangle the activity-selectivity tradeoff for direct conversion of syngas, a combination of primarily carbon monoxide and hydrogen, into desirable light olefins, which include ethylene, propylene and butylene, some of the most commonly used plastics precursors in the world.

Materials that can conduct negatively charged hydrogen atoms at ambient conditions would pave the way for advanced clean energy storage and electrochemical conversion technologies. A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated a technique that enables a room-temperature all-solid-state hydride cell by introducing and exploiting defects in the lattice structure of rare earth hydrides.

A research group led by Profs. BAO Xinhe, WANG Guoxiong and GAO Dunfeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has revealed the mechanism of coverage-driven selectivity switch from ethylene to acetate in high-rate CO2/CO electrolysis.

The impact of the direction of the chemical bond of colliding molecules on their chemical reactions has been observed in collisions of non-polar molecules for the first time. This observation and its theoretical underpinnings potentially offer a new way to control chemical reactions beyond the traditional chemical-reaction parameters of temperature, pressure and the addition of catalysts.

A research group led by Prof. WU Kaifeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently reported the successful initialization, coherent quantum-state control, and readout of spins at room temperature using solution-grown quantum dots, which represents an important advance in quantum information science.