Events
Events Calendar
“Homing Pigeons, Degradable Plastics, and Solvent Effects; How Caged Radical Pairs Impact Everyday Chemistry”
How do homing pigeons navigate? How do we design plastics so they degrade after they are used? Why are solar energy conversion systems with donor and acceptor complexes so inefficient? Why do bonds break more readily if they are under mechanical stress? It turns out that radical cage effects are important in understanding the answers to these and numerous other practical questions involving chemical reactivity. In this seminar, I will introduce the concept of caged radical pairs, and then I will show why caged radical pairs are key intermediates in the systems mentioned above and in radical reactions, in general.
~ Coffee/tea will be served prior to lecture~