CAFF Director Christy Landes held the most recent Wintergreen Meeting of Physical Chemists (September 23-27,) and even Tropical Storm Ophelia couldn’t stop these brainstorms! From postdoc to professor, 40 researchers gathered to share their work and discuss the latest topics in physical chemistry.
The next Wintergreen Meeting of Physical Chemists will be September 27-October 1, 2025.
Special thanks to our 2023 participants!
In this Center review by the Dionne, Zanni, Gruebele, Roberts, Link, and Landes Groups, our researchers delved into the advancements in ultrafast microscopy techniques, focusing on transient absorption and two-dimensional microscopy which allow us to examine the dynamic behavior of samples.
The review demonstrates how ultrafast microscopy aids in our understanding of the impact of microscopic heterogeneity on both physical and chemical processes. It may even prove to be integral to advancing quantum yields, exciton lifetimes, and carrier diffusion efficiency for modern technologies in energy conversion, catalysis, and many other areas.
Undergrad student Zain Zaidi (Levine Group, Stony Brook University) won the ACS Computers in Chemistry Division’s Undergraduate Poster Award at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco in August 2023!
Zain is a new member of CAFF and we look forward to helping him grow as he pursues degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Physics. He is currently working on our carbon dot project.
Modeling the light-driven chemical reactions of semiconducting nanocrystals has been a challenge due to the complex nature of the systems and their size, although these crystals make exceptional materials for optoelectronic devices.
Researchers from Rice University (Rossky Group) and the University of Texas at Austin (Roberts Group) developed a machine-learned force field trained on DFT data to investigate the surface chemistry of one such nanocrystal. In doing so, they were able to show that carboxylate ligands adopt a wide range “tilted-bridge” and “bridge” geometries to passivate the surface of nanocrystals. Their study demonstrates that machine-learned force fields have great potential for use in modeling of semiconducting nanocrystal.
There are many ways to initiate chemical reactions in liquids, but placing free electrons directly into water, ammonia and other liquid solutions is especially attractive for green chemistry because solvated electrons are inherently clean, leaving behind no side products after they react.
In a published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Center for Adapting Flaws into Features (CAFF) uncovered the long-sought mechanism of a well-known but poorly understood process that produces solvated electrons via interactions between light and metal.
Chemists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin discovered more isn’t always better when it comes to packing charge-acceptor molecules on the surface of semiconducting nanocrystals.
Rossky, Roberts and colleagues at CAFF systematically studied hybrid materials containing lead sulfide nanocrystals and varying concentrations of an oft-studied organic dye called perylene diimide (PDI). The experiments showed that continually increasing the concentration of PDI on the surface of nanocrystals eventually produced a precipitous drop in electron transfer rates.
Congratulations to Dr. Daniel Cotton for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis in Spring 2022! 
Dr. Cotton accepted a postdoctoral position in the Dawlaty Group at the University of Southern California.
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