Practical Considerations for Continuum Models Applied to Surface Electrochemistry

Modelling the electrolyte at the electrochemical interface remains a major challenge in ab initio simulations of charge transfer processes at surfaces. Recently, the development of hybrid polarizable continuum models/ab initio models have allowed for the treatment of solvation and electrolyte charge in a computationally efficient way. However, challenges remain in its application. Recent literature has reported that large cell heights are required to reach convergence, which presents a serious computational cost. Furthermore, calculations of reaction energetics require costly iterations to tune the surface charge to the desired potential. In this work, we present a simple capacitor model of the interface that illuminates how to circumvent both of these challenges. We derive a correction to the energy for finite cell heights to obtain the large cell energies at no additional computational expense. We furthermore demonstrate that the reaction energetics determined at constant charge are easily mapped to those at constant potential, which eliminates the need to apply iterative schemes to tune the system to a constant potential. These developments together represent more than an order of magnitude reduction of the computational overhead required for the application of polarizable continuum models to surface electrochemistry.     

Skin‐worn Soft Microfluidic Potentiometric Detection System

A flexible skin‐mounted microfluidic potentiometric device for simultaneous electrochemical monitoring of sodium and potassium in sweat is presented. The wearable device allows efficient natural sweat pumping to the potentiometric detection chamber, containing solid‐contact ion‐selective Na⁺ and K⁺ electrodes, during exercise activity. The fabricated microchip electrolyte‐sensing device displays good analytical performance and addresses sweat mixing and carry‐over issues of early epidermal potentiometric sensors. Such soft skin‐worn microchip platform integrates potentiometric measurement, microfluidic technologies with flexible electronics for real‐time wireless data transmission to mobile devices. The new fully integrated microfluidic electrolyte‐detection device paves the way for practical fitness and health monitoring applications.     

A comparison of the structure and bonding in the donor–acceptor complexes H3N → BR(OH)2 and H3N → BRH(OH) (R = H; NH2, OH,and F): a computational investigation

Structural Chemistry - Boronic acids, R–B(OH)2, play an important role in synthetic, biological, medicinal, and materials chemistry. Borinic acids, R–BH(OH), find relevance in similar...     

Hydrostibination

A rigid naphthalenediamine framework has been used to prepare antimony hydrides that feature LUMO shapes and energies similar to those found in secondary boranes. By exploiting this feature, we introduce the first examples of uncatalyzed hydrostibination reactions of robust C≡C, C=C, C=O, and N=N bonds as new elementary hydrometalation reactions analogous to hydroboration. These results endorse the notion of a diagonal relationship between the lightest p‐block element and the heaviest Group 15 elements and may lead to the conception of novel reaction chemistry.     

X-ray absorption spectroscopy study of the electronic structure and local coordination of 1st row transition metal-promoted Chevrel-phase sulfides

Abstract

The electronic structures of S and Mo as well as the local coordination of Mo are investigated as a function of metal promotion Chevrel-phase (CP) sulfides. We observe the effect of metal promoter-induced electron donation into the stoichiometric range M_xMo₆S₈ (M?=?Fe, Ni, Cu; x?=?0–2) through analysis of X-ray absorption near-edge structure regions. We further observe the effect of this promotion on the bonding environment of Mo₆ metal centers through extended X-ray absorption fine structure analysis. We monitor expansion and contraction of Mo₆ octahedra with and without metal promotion, as has been predicted by Hückel molecular orbital theory. We further observe a marked tunability in the electronic structure of sulfur upon charge transfer between promoting species and Mo₆S₈ units. Average Mo₆ octahedron Mo–Mo bond contraction from 2.76 Å to as short as 2.69 Å was observed upon incorporation of metal promoters, while intercluster separation displays a pronounced increase for promoter-host lattices compared to un-promoted Mo₆S₈. To corroborate spectroscopically observed phenomena, we performed computational analyses of spin-polarized densities of state for the CP materials investigated herein, where a detectable increase in sulfur-based frontier orbital population is observed in accordance with experimentally validated orbital filling.     

Triphenylamine-substituted 2-pyridyl-1,2,3-triazole copper(I) complexes: an experimental and computational investigation

Abstract

Four new heteroleptic copper(I) complexes bearing either 2-pyridyl-1,2,3-triazole (pytri) or the related triphenylamine (TPA) substituted (TPA-tripy) ligands and the ancillary ligands 6,6′-dimesityl-2,2′-bipyridine (diMesbpy) or bis[(2-diphenylphosphino)phenyl] ether (POP) were synthesized in good yields (75-95%). All the complexes were extensively characterized using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopies and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESIMS) and in the case of the two pytri compounds the solid state structures were determined via X-ray crystallography. The pytri complexes showed MLCT absorption bands which shift from 433?nm for the diMesbpy complex to 347?nm for POP. TPA-pytri complexes introduce an ILCT band resulting in improved visible absorption (376?nm, 26,400 M^?1 cm^?1 for [Cu(TPA-pytri)(diMesbpy)](PF₆)). Emission from this ILCT state (470?nm, Φ?=?0.08) was red-shifted compared to the free ligand with negligible effects from ancillary ligands. Band assignments were confirmed with resonance Raman spectroscopy and TD-DFT calculations.     

Nanostructuring of 1-butyl-4-methylpyridinium chloride in ionic liquid–iron oxide nanofluids

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - Understanding the behavior of ionic liquids (ILs) in ionic liquid-based nanofluids has great significance for its proper application. The phase changes...     

Mildred Dresselhaus and Solid State Pedagogy at MIT

Mildred Dresselhaus is known for her influential research on the physics of carbon. Her wide‐ranging influence as a physics teacher, although well‐known to her students, has been less thoroughly examined. Exploring how Dresselhaus grew into her role teaching solid state physics at MIT reveals much about how that subfield evolved.