报告题目：Catalyzing and Controlling Chemical Reactions with Electric Fields

报 告 人：Prof. Michelle L. Coote

报告时间：2019年03月14日（周四）下午2:30

报告地点：八号楼三楼会议室

邀 请 人：杨利明研究员

报告人简介：

Professor Michelle Coote received her PhD in polymer chemistry 2000 from the University of New South Wales. After postdoctoral work in polymer physics at the University of Durham, UK, she joined the Australian National University in 2001, initially as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Leo Radom. She established her own research group in 2004 and became a full Professor in 2010. She has received many awards, including the HG Smith Medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, the Pople medal of the Australia-Pacific Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, and was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2014. She is currently an ARC Laureate Fellow and an Associate Editor of J. Am. Chem. Soc.

报告简介：

   Chemists appreciate that the rate of redox reactions can be manipulated by means of an electrical potential gradient. However, it was only in 2016 that it was shown that an external electric field can also be used to catalyze non-redox reactions, thereby opening up a new dimension to chemical catalysis. So-called electrostatic catalysis arises because most chemical species have some degree of polarity and so can be stabilized by an appropriately aligned electric field; when this occurs to a greater extent in transition states compared with reactants, reactions are catalyzed. However, by their nature such effects are highly directional and so implementing them in practical chemical systems is problematic. We have been using a combination of theory and experiment to explore various solutions to this problem. The first is using surface chemistry techniques, in conjunction with the break-junction technique in scanning tunnelling microscopy. This allows us to detect chemical reaction events at the single molecule level, whilst delivering an oriented electrical field-stimulus across the approaching reactants. The second is making use of the electric fields within the double layers of electrochemical cells to manipulate both redox and non-redox unimolecular reactions. Here we find that molecules actually self-align and interact with electrolyte ions to facilitate catalysis. Finally, in an approach that is truly scalable, we have instead addressed problem of orientation of the electric field by making use of appropriately placed charged functional groups to provide the electrostatic stabilization for solution-phase reactions. In this way, the direction of the local field experienced by the reaction centre is fixed, and by associating the stabilization or destabilization with the protonation state of an acid or base group, it has the advantage of providing a convenient pH switch. In this talk our experimental and theoretical results will be presented and the prospects for electrostatic catalysis discussed.