[4][9] In DuPont's Central Research and Development Department, Arduengo began his career in the Chemical Sciences Section (1977 & on return in 1984).
On return to DuPont, Arduengo maintained a guest Professor appointment in Braunschweig, and in 1999 also made the transition to academe in the U.S. with his assumption of the Saxon Chair in Chemistry at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
[6][10][11][12] In 1977 when he joined E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Arduengo became a member of the exploratory chemistry group of Howard Simmons in CR&D.
During the Illinois years Arduengo had a close collaboration with his colleague J.C. Martin who was a physical-organic chemist also working on organo-main group element chemistry and hypervalency.
Many of the technical discussions between Martin and Arduengo would take place over lunch (the choice of restaurants often influenced by the quality of the napkins for writing chemical structures).
[16] To facilitate discussions about unusual molecular structures and bonding for main-group element centers, Martin and Arduengo devised the N-X-L nomenclature system.
[17][18][19] The synthesis and characterization of the first compound with a planar T-shaped, 10-electron 3-coordinate bonding arrangement at a phosphorus atom, ADPO,[20] was also accomplished by the Arduengo group at Illinois and paved the way for a range of novel main-group element chemistry (including the discovery of edge inversion) on his return to DuPont.
[21] On returning to DuPont in 1984, Arduengo resumed a position in CR&D and continued the research into the recently discovered ADPO molecule and related structures.
[36][37] As Arduengo's involvement in the automotive coatings program came to an end, he submitted a proposal to the management in CR&D to isolate these apparently stable carbenes and study their chemistry.
The proposal was soundly declined with the admonition that he should have certainly known better than to make such a suggestion in light of the long history of carbene chemistry that firmly established them as reactive intermediates that could not be isolated as stable entities.
[39] After the first successful reaction to produce a stable carbene, Arduengo won the support of DuPont management[37] and research in this area continued.
[44] The imidazol-2-ylidenes were extensively characterized by their NMR properties,[45] photo-electron spectroscopy,[46] and exact experimental electron density mapping by X-ray and neutron diffraction techniques.
[66] Although the majority of Wanzlick's work on the saturated imidazolin-2-ylidenes would have been expected to yield dimers in the absence of bulky substituents on nitrogen, a single (unsaturated) imidazol-2-ylidene, 1,3,4,5-tetraphenylimidazol-2-ylidene, remained as an example of a carbene that could (should) have been isolable.
With these problems corrected, the DuPont scientists were able to isolate the target carbene and fully characterize it including an X-ray structure determination.
"[66] At the University of Alabama research from Arduengo's laboratory has focused on enhancements to the basic structure of the imidazol-2-ylidenes through substituent effects leading to novel compounds like a cyclopentadienyl fused imidazol-2-ylidene.
[4] In 2015, together with Professor Till Opatz (Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz) Arduengo founded the StanCE coalition for sustainable chemistry based on woody biomass (Xylochemistry).