R.R. Schrock, R.T. DePue, J. Feldman, K.B. Yap, et al., "Further studies of imido alkylidene complexes of tungsten, well-characterized olefin metathesis catalysts with controllable activity," Organometallics, 9:2262-75, 1990.
Richard R. Schrock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge): "In the olefin metathesis reaction, carbon-carbon double bonds are `chopped in half' and re-formed at random. In this paper we report well-defined metal complexes for this reaction that are relatively stable and whose activity can be `tuned' by varying the nature of alkoxide ligands bound to the metal. The methods reported here have now been extended to the synthesis of analogous molybdenum catalysts and related rhenium catalysts.
The most significant impact so far has been in polymer synthesis by living ring opening of cyclic olefins, especially those that contain functionalities. These catalysts have been used to synthesize polyenes of known length, semiconductor and metal clusters in the 20- to 40-angstrom range, microphase-separated block copolymers, ...
