Synthesis of discrete catalytic oligomers and their potential in silica-supported cooperative catalysis.

Cooperative catalysis on solid surfaces relies primarily on two or more catalytic partners being close enough to each other to sustain the catalytic cycle. We describe here the synthesis and preliminary investigation of discrete homo-oligomers as flexible scaffolds to inflect the intersite distance and blur the compositional heterogeneity in a silica-grafted catalytic triad.