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Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1992
Developments in field of electron and related transfers — early and recent
The electron transfer field has developed in numerous directions in the past half century. The subfields range from biological electron transfer (ET) to solar energy conversion, from ET in enzymes to ET in semiconductors, from transfer between molecules or ions in liquids to between liquids and between liquids and electrodes. They include ET's that are photoinduced and those that, instead, are light emitters. Studies now range from ET in ensembles to ET in the complementary field of single molecules. Some of the concepts developed originally for electron transfers, such as the dependence of reaction rate constant on standard free energy of reaction, and the cross-relation, have been extended to atom and group transfers, though with a very different model for the potential energy surface. The usual pair of parabolas for ET was replaced by a more usual description of atom transfers. The model still gave the cross-relation for the rate constants (it works well) but not the inverted effect, a difference understood from the difference in topography of the potential energy curves for the ET and for the atom or group transfer. The developments of very fast ET introduced a new element and focused attention on solvent dynamics and the long neglected Kramers' theory. In this lecture we summarize and discuss some of this history and current directions, including those related to solar energy conversion and to intermittent fluorescence of nanoparticles.
Sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon Department of Chemistry and the Mellon College of Science. The Mellon Institute is located at 4400 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. For more information, please contact 412-268-1062