Publications

New methods for preparation of tailor-made fluorine-containing compounds are in extremely high demand in nearly every sector of chemical industry. The asymmetric construction of quaternary C-F stereogenic centers is the most synthetically challenging and, consequently, the least developed area of research. As a reflection of this apparent methodological deficit, pharmaceutical drugs featuring C-F stereogenic centers constitute less than 1% of all fluorine-containing medicines currently on the market or in clinical development. Here we provide a comprehensive review of current research activity in this area, including such general directions as asymmetric electrophilic fluorination via organocatalytic and transition-metal catalyzed reactions, asymmetric elaboration of fluorine-containing substrates via alkylations, Mannich, Michael, and aldol additions, cross-coupling reactions, and biocatalytic approaches.

Abstract Sodium‐ion battery (SIB) shows great potential for large‐scale energy storage, high‐power and low‐temperature supplies. Pitch is a promising precursor for preparing carbon anode materials for SIBs owing to its low cost, high carbon yield, and structural tunability. In this review, the preparation and application of pitch‐derived soft‐ and hard‐carbons for SIBs are discussed from a practical perspective. We first introduce the full‐slope sodium storage behavior of soft carbon, mainly focused on the storage mechanism, high‐rate feature, modification strategies, application scenario, and existing challenges. Thereafter, we present the preparation of pitch‐derived hard carbon mainly through pre‐oxidation and carbonization. The crucial influencing factors, including pitch property, pre‐oxidation temperature, holding time, heating rate, atmosphere, and carbonization conditions, as well as the underlying mechanisms, are discussed. From scientific and industrial points of view, we also propose the challenges for application of pitch‐derived carbon materials. Future efforts should be paid on clarifying the sodium storage mechanisms and electrochemical kinetics of carbon, revealing the screening criteria of pitch and the “preparation‐structure‐performance” relationships through a combination of experiments, artificial intelligence, and big data techniques. Material design and preparation guidance should be obtained to push forward pitch‐based carbon for practical SIBs.

This paper advocates a different approach to reduce routing convergence--side-stepping the problem by avoiding it in the first place! Rather than recomputing paths after temporary topology changes, we argue for a separation of timescale between offline computation of multiple diverse paths and online spreading of load over these paths. We believe decoupling failure recovery from path computation leads to networks that are inherently more efficient, more scalable, and easier to manage.

Intermolecular additions of the O-H bonds of phenols and alcohols and the N-H bonds of sulfonamides and benzamide to olefins catalyzed by 1 mol % of triflic acid and studies to define the relationship between these reactions and those catalyzed by metal triflates are reported. Cyclization of an alcohol containing pendant monosubstituted and trisubstituted olefins catalyzed by either triflic acid or metal triflates form products from addition to the more substituted olefin, and additions of tosylamide catalyzed by triflic acid or metal triflates form indistinguishable ratios of the two N-alkyl sulfonamides.

Abstract Understanding thermal transport across metal/semiconductor interfaces is crucial for the heat dissipation of electronics. The dominant heat carriers in non-metals, phonons, are thought to transport elastically across most interfaces, except for a few extreme cases where the two materials that formed the interface are highly dissimilar with a large difference in Debye temperature. In this work, we show that even for two materials with similar Debye temperatures (Al/Si, Al/GaN), a substantial portion of phonons will transport inelastically across their interfaces at high temperatures, significantly enhancing interface thermal conductance. Moreover, we find that interface sharpness strongly affects phonon transport process. For atomically sharp interfaces, phonons are allowed to transport inelastically and interface thermal conductance linearly increases at high temperatures. With a diffuse interface, inelastic phonon transport diminishes. Our results provide new insights on phonon transport across interfaces and open up opportunities for engineering interface thermal conductance specifically for materials of relevance to microelectronics.

A recent trend in routing research is to avoid inefficiencies in network-level routing by allowing hosts to either choose routes themselves (e.g., source routing) or use overlay routing networks (e.g., Detour or RON). Such approaches result in selfish routing, because routing decisions are no longer based on system-wide criteria but are instead designed to optimize host-based or overlay-based metrics. A series of theoretical results showing that selfish routing can result in suboptimal system behavior have cast doubts on this approach. In this paper, we use a game-theoretic approach to investigate the performance of selfish routing in Internet-like environments based on realistic topologies and traffic demands in our simulations. We show that in contrast to theoretical worst cases, selfish routing achieves close to optimal average latency in such environments. However, such performance benefits come at the expense of significantly increased congestion on certain links. Moreover, the adaptive nature of selfish overlays can significantly reduce the effectiveness of traffic engineering by making network traffic less predictable.