ascorbic acid are summarized in c creutz inorg chem 1981 20 4449 the reaction appears to be very forgiving and does not require any special precautions it proceeds to completion in 6 to 36 hours at ambient temperature in a variety of solvents including aqueous t butanol or ethanol and very importantly water with no organic co solvent starting materials do not need to be dissolved in the reaction solvent the reaction seems to proceed just as efficiently as long as adequate stirring is maintained although most experiments were performed at near neutral ph the catalysis seems to proceed well at ph values ranging from ca 4 to 12 the catalytic process is very robust and insensitive to usual reaction parameters it is further disclosed that cu 0 can also be used as a source of the catalytic species although these reactions may take longer to proceed to completion the experimental procedure is exceedingly simple for example bis triazole shown in entry 2 fig3 a was obtained in quantitative yield after stirring the corresponding azide and acetylene components for 24 h with ca 2 g of copper metal turnings the turnings were removed at the end of the reaction and the pure white product was collected by simple filtration the reaction between phenyl propargyl ether and benzylazide in the presence of 5 mol of sodium ascorbate and 1 mol of copper ii sulfate in 2 1 water t butanol mixture furnished the 1 4 disubstituted triazole product in 91 yield after stirring for 8 hours at room temperature in a capped scintillation vial but otherwise with no effort to exclude oxygen eq 2 the regiochemistry of the product was established by noe experiments and confirmed by the x ray crystallographic.