Need a nice shiny new oxidiser, try HOOOH. This was recently prepared in “pure form” by evaporation of an ether solution to give a white glassy material stable when manipulated at -50°C. Brave chemists from the University of Ljubljana!

Take a bromopolystyrene bead and make a Grignard reagent with it and treat this with chlorodimethyl silane to give the silylated polystyrene –

Now the fun starts. You add ozone to  give the product  “bead”-Si-OOOH. This can be done dry or in a suitable solvent at -78°.The best solvent for this is ether, which helps stabilise the Si-OOOH unit

Adding a catalyst liberates HOOOH into the solvent. The catalyst is “a tungsten or molybdenum heteropoly acid H₃PM₁₂O₄₀, (M = W or Mo) used in comparatively small amounts (0.1mol%)“. The HOOOH was characterised by NMR and can be stored as a solution or neat at -20°C. If acetone is used the oxidant adds to acetone, a reaction catalysed by the heteropoly acid, to give

Now that is a great compound, I wonder what it can do? In fact the HOOOH is also a wonderful compound, what can it do? I can just imagine the pilot plant managers reaction if I suggested we make a few kgs of this! But the good thing about it is that it can be generated as needed, catalytically. So do the generation in the presence of an olefin, acetylene, alcohol etc it would be great to find out what comes out. Better than oxone? Now we have H₂O, H₂O₂ and H₂O₃ !

Tremendous potential here and a great publication, congratulations.

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