Light-to-Heat (Photothermal) Conversion Promotes High Activation Barrier Reactions
Presented by Prof. Erin Stache
Hosted by Prof. Luis Campos
Abstract:
Photon-driven processes have become a powerful tool for achieving challenging bond cleavages and formations. Photocatalysis offers temporal and spatial control with low-energy light, which has been widely advantageous for efficiently building molecular complexity from simple starting materials. The judicious choice of photocatalysts enables the precision of reactivity that is rarely achieved with other forms of catalysis and heating. An underused area of photocatalysis is light-to-heat (photothermal) conversion. Irradiation of specific nanoparticles or dyes with visible light creates intense thermal gradients in a photothermal conversion process. In contrast to bulk heating, where the temperature remains uniform across a reaction medium, substrates would only experience thermal energy within a few nanometers of excitation under temporal heating. Consequently, this process uses irradiation to drive chemical processes at high temperatures with temporal and spatial control. I will show this phenomenon as applied to challenges such as chemical recycling to monomer, broad-spectrum wavelength photocontrolled polymerizations, intramolecular rearrangements, and intermolecular coupling reactions.
Bio:
Erin is an assistant professor at Princeton University's Department of Chemistry. She earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and her PhD from Colorado State University in collaboration with Professors Tom Rovis and Abby Doyle in 2018. Afterward, she spent two years as a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Professor Brett P. Fors's lab at Cornell University before starting her independent career there in 2020. Her research in the Stache Lab combines synthetic organic chemistry, photochemistry, inorganic materials, and polymer chemistry for new synthesis and materials science applications. Her group focuses on developing new polymerization strategies using catalysis to access degradable polymers or materials with unique properties, with a particular emphasis on photocatalysis for sustainable synthesis and depolymerization.
Read more about the Stache Lab here
