This Phase-I Center for Chemical Innovation will seek to discover, characterize and subsequently utilize a wide range of highly energetic and non-equilibrium chemical processes at interfaces. This will enable transformative advances in catalysis, materials growth and processing, and condensed state environmental chemistry. Scientific opportunities include the preparation of new classes of metastable interfaces with enhanced catalytic function, chemistry carried out with different reagent and substrate temperatures leading to enhanced process selectivity, new concepts in carbon dioxide management, and the creation of new or refined functional materials based on growth and processing under energetic and non-equilibrium conditions. The CCI brings a wide range of tools to bear on this grand challenge, including supersonic and hyperthermal molecular beams, in situ and ex situ scanning probe and electron microscopy, a complete suite of surface science and optical analytical spectroscopies, quantum chemical and materials computation, and molecular dynamics, molecular mechanics and Monte Carlo simulations.
The Center for Energetic Non-Equilibrium Chemistry at Interfaces (CENECI) will support collaborative and team-based discovery that integrates researchers at the University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Montana State University and Northwestern University. Postdoctoral fellows as well as students at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels will participate in research activities in more than one CENECI laboratory, thus significantly broadening their training and introducing them to team-based discovery. These activities will be enabled by cyberinfrastructure links among all of the groups and a CENECI website, allowing ready participation in meetings, seminars, computation, and experiments from afar. A comprehensive outreach program will accompany activities at all institutions, with the focus during Phase-I being on chemistry education enrichment to the local underrepresented Hispanic and African-American K-12 populations in Chicago, Madison, and Boston, as well the Native American communities of Montana.
The Centers for Chemical Innovation (CCI) Program supports research centers that can address major, long-term fundamental chemical research challenges that have a high probability of both producing transformative research and leading to innovation. These Centers will attract broad scientific and public interest by sharing the results of their innovative approach to this challenging question.
sought to discover highly energetic and non-equilibrium chemical processes at interfaces to enable transformative advances in catalysis leading to energy-rich chemicals, carbon dioxide management, materials growth and processing, and chemical reactions at liquird surfaces relevant to water management and sustainability. We focused on developing and exploiting interfacial chemical processes that occurred outside of typical thermal equilibrium conditions that utilized unexplored excited regions of the potential energy surfaces that govern most chemical processes. Examples included heterogeneous catalysis, interfacial materials processing, and and charge transfer reactions at liquid interfaces. CENECI consisted of 14 research groups across the country engaged in this collaborative research effort including: Scott Anderson, U. of Utah; Sylvia Ceyer, MIT; Erica Corral, U. of Arizona; Bill Hase, Texas Tech; Manos Mavrikakis, U. of Wisconsin-Madison, Timothy K. Minton, Montana State Univ.; Margaret Murnane, U. of Colorado-Boulder/JILA; Gilbert Nathanson, U. of Wisconsin-Madison; David Nesbitt, U. of Colorado-Boulder/JILA; Teri Odom, Northwestern Univ.; George Schatz, Northwestern Univ.; Steven J. Sibener, U. of Chicago; Charlie Sykes, Tufts Univ.; Dmitri Talapin, U. of Chicago. These groups brought to CENECI the full suite of essential skills in experiment, chemical synthesis, theory, and numerical simulation needed to tackle a transformative selection of Grand Challenge chemical problems within a multi-investigator/multi-disciplinary center environment with especially close coordination between experiment and theory. The high-risk/high-payoff character of this program was designed to utilize CENECI’s powerful multi-investigator skill base in non-equilibrium interfacial chemistry, going far beyond the scope of problems that could be addressed by isolated individual investigators. CENECI’s research program was tightly focused on three areas: reactions of non-equilibrium species at interfaces, interfacial materials chemistry under energetic and non-equilibrium conditions, and energetic and non-equilibrium chemistry at liquid interfaces. Specific methods and expertise within the Center encompassed supersonic and hyperthermal molecular beams, scanning probe and electron microscopy, chemical synthesis, high temperature materials chemistry, nanoparticle based materials and nanofabrication, plasmonic materials, ultrafast spectroscopy/high harmonic x-ray generation, a suite of surface science and optical analytical spectroscopies, quantum chemical and materials computation, as well as molecular dynamics, molecular mechanics and Monte Carlo simulations. CENECI’s connections to the high tech, chemical, and education sectors including the largest science museum in the midwest ensured an efficient flow of innovations to the public sector. CENECI Innovation Partners included Cabot Microelectronics, Lockheed-Martin, Nalco, Argonne, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Postdoctoral fellows as well as students at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels participated in the scientific activities of the Center, and had the opportunity to participate in research activities at more than one location, thus significantly broadening their training and introducing them to team-based discovery. A comprehensive outreach program accompanied activities at all institutions, with a focus on chemistry education enrichment to local underrepresented Hispanic and African-American K-12 students in Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Madison, and the Native American communities of Montana. A collaboration with the Museum of Science and Industry was initiated to help develop its highly successful Interactive Periodic Table exhibit, and to begin efforts to translate it onto portable devices such iPads, and to use these in outreach activities to reinforce interest in the chemical sciences.
