Thiel Award 2025 for Jonathan Mauß

The best publication by an early-career scientist of the past year presents a potentially sustainable route to benzene production.

The Thiel Award 2025 of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung for the best publication by a young scientist has been awarded to Jonathan Mauß. He is being honored for his work on the catalytic conversion of acetylene into aromatic compounds such as benzene - a reaction that has long been of great interest to both chemistry and industry.

The starting point of the doctoral researcher’s work in heterogeneous catalysis was the question of how pressurized acetylene can be efficiently converted into benzene in the gas phase at moderate temperatures. Aromatic base chemicals such as benzene, which are currently predominantly derived from fossil sources, form an important foundation for many materials - from plastics to pharmaceutical active ingredients. A sustainable approach could be to obtain acetylene from biomethane in the future and use it to selectively produce aromatic base chemicals.

The experimental implementation proved challenging: highly reactive acetylene must be handled in a controlled manner under pressure, while the catalysts used are extremely sensitive to moisture. To address this, Mauß immobilized niobium pentachloride on mesoporous silica gel under an inert atmosphere. He demonstrated that, upon gas-phase contact, an active low-valent niobium catalyst forms on the surface, enabling the direct conversion of acetylene into benzene. With this approach, the activity of previously known catalysts was increased by approximately a factor of twenty.

In the eyes of the jury, not only the demanding experimental work but also the close collaboration with several research groups in applying complex analytical methods—such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), mass spectrometry (MS), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES)—deserved special recognition. Through this collaborative effort, Mauß was able to gain deeper insights into the reaction mechanism and identify and systematically improve the key properties of the catalyst.

The publication awarded the Thiel Award 2025, titled “A Heterogenized Molecular Catalyst for the Gas-Phase Cyclotrimerization of Acetylene to Benzene,” appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.