Structural Dynamics in Chemical Systems (FS-SCS)

- Our publication on "Atomic Scale Methods in Energy Research" just got pubished in Advanced Energy Materials; DOI: 10.1002/aenm.202404280
- Water splitting: we just came back from our beamtime at Spring-8/Japan

- Our publication on the "Neutral and Ionic Co(II) Metal–organic Frameworks" just got published in Dalton Transactions; DOI: 10.1039/d4dt02679a

- Water splitting: Sulaiman received a special travel grant for his beamtime at Spring-8/Japan

- Water splitting: we just came back from our beamtime at Soleil/France

- Organic electronics/spincrossover: we just came back from our beamtime at Diamond

- HeisenbergRIXS consortium: soft X-ray spectroscopy@SCS@EuropeanXFEL; DOI: 10.1107/S1600577524010890

Pulsed X-rays Make us Happy

The website is currently shared between two workgroups – FS-BIG (Prof. S. Bari), concentrating on the study of organic gas phase reactions and the dynamics of biomolecules, and FS-SCS (Prof. S. Techert), focusing on the study of soft matter reactions in the condensed phase (liquid, solid).

Structural Dynamics in Chemical Systems

Motivation:
- Exploring the temporal landscape of structural dynamics in soft matter
- We study in particular the mechanisms of complex chemical and biochemical reactions
- Precisely, we study the reacting molecules' time-dependent electronic and spatial behavior during chemical reactions
- For this we employ ultrafast and time-resolved elastic and inelastic X-ray scattering techniques (diffraction and spectroscopy), which we develop for high-flux X-ray sources (synchrotrons and free-electron lasers), the so-called "molecular movie methods" in the time-resolved and ultrafast X-ray field
Aim:
- At a fundamental level, beyond Polanyi, we aim to compress ‘traditional’ or classical reaction coordinates into novel reaction coordinate descriptions that allow us to directly derive, in real time, the changes in physico-chemical parameters from the reactants to the formed ultrafast species / intermediates / metastable states during a reaction (such as the evolution of energy, entropy, energy/entropy flow, structural changes, etc.).
- We thus describe biochemical reactions and function beyond simple “structure-function” principles, and our new insights directly influence the design of novel smart bioorganic and organic materials
History:
- So far, we have studied over 300 different types of chemical and biochemical reactions and found that if we want to understand our “molecular movies” and the reaction’s driving forces, we needed to overcome traditional kinetics descriptions ...

FS-SCS: From Structural to Topological to Functional Dynamics in Chemical Reactions
FS-SCS: From Local to Global Dynamics in Chemical Reactions: Electronic Changes
FS-BIG: Structure and Dynamics of Gas-Phase Biomolecules
FS-BIG: Ultrafast Imaging of Gas-Phase Reactions
References

Our Group Members Work Interdisciplinary

Our group members are chemists, physicist, crystallographer or molecular biologist. Our lively discussions form an inspiring, stimulating and creative room for ideas between the boarders of the scientific disciplines, and allow for the development of novel scientific ideas and solutions in-between. We develop instrumentation for high flux X-ray sources which are necessary for our structural dynamics studies on complex chemical and biochemical reactions and systems, but we also try to understand our studied reactions from first principles in chemical reaction dynamics.

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