The Active Sites in the Phillips Catalysts: Origins of a Lively Debate and a Vision for the Future

In this work, we summarize and critically compare some of the experimental results recently published on the Phillips catalyst, in the attempt to make the point on a few particularly debated questions that have recently animated the specialized literature; in particular, we discuss the structure of the active chromium sites and how ethylene polymerization initiates on them. The data collected in this article unequivocally demonstrate that the...