Cover Picture: Remarkable Improvement of Catalytic Performance for a New Cobalt‐Decorated Cu/HMS Catalyst in the Hydrogenation of Dimethyloxalate (ChemCatChem 1/2013)

The sky's the limit! The cover picture shows the remarkable improvement in performance of a copper–cobalt bimetallic catalyst with only 1 % cobalt decoration for the catalytic hydrogenation of dimethyloxalate to ethylene glycol. In their Communication on p. 138 ff., W.-L. Dai et al. describe how a tiny amount of metallic cobalt can greatly promote the activation of molecular hydrogen and provide more active hydrogen atoms to react with adsorbed dimethyloxalate molecules. Intimate interactions between copper and cobalt and a high content of metallic cobalt species can be obtained by using the co-ammonia-evaporation approach, which could open up new avenues for the preparation of Cu-Co binary-alloy nanoparticles and provide an efficient catalyst with great potential for the industrial synthesis of ethylene glycol from syngas.