STORIES
Dynamics in Ionic Liquid Thin Films
We made 20 ~ 250 nm flat thin films of ionic liquids, and measured the dynamics in the films using 2D IR spectroscopy. Dynamics in these films are slower than those in bulk ionic liquid. The thinner the film is, the slower its dynamics will be. We also achieved the controlling of dynamics in the ionic liquid films by adjusting the substrate surface charge density.
What Affects the Electronic Coupling (HDA) between Two Molecules?
The electronic coupling is very sensitive to the relative orientation between the electron donor and acceptor. If the relative orientation is fixed, HDA decays exponentially regarding to the distance between the molecules.
How is the charge of reactants affects the reaction dynamics in ionic liquids?
In ionic liquid solvent, neutral solutes diffuse faster than similar sized ionic solutes. Therefore, in a photo-induced bimolecular electron transfer reaction, reactants with charge exhibit smaller diffusion-limited rate constants than neutral reactants.
The effect of anion size on the structure of ionic liquids
If nano-domain aggregations are presented in ionic liquids due to a long alkyl chain in the cation, a longer non-polar side chain in the anion reduces the size of these domains.
The structure of zwitterionic liquids
The structure of a zwitterionic liquid is compared with its analogous conventional ionic liquid. In both ionic liquids, intermediate-range structural reorganization is observed, but they arise from very different mechanisms, one is nano-domain aggregation, and the other probably H-bonding network.
The structure of ionic liquid when a carbon atom in cation is replaced by silicon
The intermolecular interactions between the ions in ionic liquids become weaker, when a carbon atom in an ionic liquid is substituted by silicon.
Modeling the Electron Transfer Reactions in Ionic Liquids
We developed diffusion-reaction models to describe the fluorescence quenching of an electron acceptors in the presence of electron donor. In ionic liquids, a distance-dependent reaction rate is required in the models to describe experimental data. Our model based on Marcus theory can predict the diffusion coefficients and reaction free energy from electron transfer fluorescence quenching data.