Facile Synthesis of Anhydrous Rare-Earth Trichlorides from their Oxides in Chloridoaluminate Ionic Liquids.

Wide applications of anhydrous rare-earth (RE) trichlorides RECl in organometallic chemistry, for the synthesis of optical and magnetic materials, and as catalysts require a facile approach for their synthesis. The known methods use or produce toxic substances, are complicated and have limited reliability and upscaling. It has been shown that task-specific ionic liquids (ILs) can dissolve many metal oxides without special reaction conditions at moderate temperature, making the metals accessible to downstream chemistry.