Paper PS-WeA2
INVITED TALK: Interfacial Chemistry in Highly Reactive Systems

Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 2:40 pm, Room B130

I joined IBM shortly after John Coburn and his close collaborator, Harold Winters, began publishing their seminal papers on use of XeF₂ to understand fundamental processes involved in plasma etching of silicon. They introduced me to the world of disordered surface reaction environments, and to the techniques they used to carry out careful experiments that shed light on how manufacturing processes work. I saw that it was possible to use well-chosen model systems to make sense of what controls interfacial chemistry in highly reactive, complex systems, and have been working on this type of problem ever since. In this talk I will describe how I have used model systems and multiscale computation to investigate the chemistry of oxidation of nanoscale organic aerosol by OH, relevant to atmospheric processes, and the photochemical generation of charge in porous photoanodes, relevant to solar energy conversion. In both cases, the interplay between transport and reactions is very sensitive to the composition of the chemical system, revealing opportunities for learning how to think more generally about rules governing interfacial reactivity.