Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

We would like to conduct studies of chemical dynamics in room temperature ionic liquids and in sub- and supercritical fluids. Ionic liquids are almost completely made of ions, while a supercritical fluid is any fluid above its critical temperature and pressure where there is no distinct gas and liquid phase. Our studies, in the long term, will give us information that will be useful to design novel industrial processes that are both economical and environmentally-friendly. In particular, we will be able to contribute in finding the optimum thermodynamic conditions for supercritical fluid based processes or types of ionic liquids in ionic liquid based processes. For many of our studies we use muons which from a chemical point of view can be considered as light protons. We would also like to expand a new technique, laser-pump muon probe technique, that we have recently developed to study the Kinetic Isotope Effects of atomic hydrogen reactions in the exited states, to probe transients in ionizing radiation processes, as well as free radical intermediates in excited states. We would also like to develop other novel spectroscopic methods. One such method would be the development of electrochemical-muon spectroscopy techniques in order to produce novel reactive intermediates electrochemically, or using a combination of electrochemical methods followed by muon irradiation. We will then investigate the electronic structure of these reactive intermediates through the coupling of nuclei to unpaired electrons (hyperfine interactions) by muon methods. I will continue to use the interdisciplinary setting and state-of-the-art experimental tools at the two major facilities that we use, TRIUMF national laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, and Rutherford Appleton laboratory in the UK, combined with the computational chemistry methods and conventional lab methods to provide a unique training environment for undergraduate and Master students involved in this research program. For our research on supercritical fluids and ionic liquids, we will focus on providing mechanistic and dynamics information related to free radical chemistry and intermolecular interactions that are relevant to potential chemical and manufacturing industries.