Caught in the Act: Using stroboscopic measurements to observe and understanding chemical transformations as they occur

The efficient and selective synthesis of novel materials represents the core objective of chemistry. While intuition and serendipity have played a key role in chemical synthesis, predicting and ideally controlling chemical reactivity provides a critical objective of much research in the chemical sciences. I will present a personal account of key challenges and opportunities for increasing our understanding of chemical reactivity through real-time observation of chemical reaction dynamics. These challenges and opportunities will be discussed in the context of two case studies: one focused on thermally driven hydrogen bond making and breaking in aqueous solutions and the other on the dynamics of electronic excited states in model photocatalytic materials.

Speaker: Kelly Gaffney, Photo Science