Edward W. Castner

Spotlight on ionic liquids

Ionic liquids are an emerging class of materials with a diverse and extraordinary set of properties. Understanding the origins of these properties and how they can be controlled by design to serve valuable practical applications presents a wide array of challenges and opportunities to the chemical physics and physical chemistry community. We highlight here some of the significant progress already made and future research directions in this exciting area.

Subpicosecond resolution studies of solvation dynamics in polar aprotic and alcohol solvents

Subpicosecond resolution measurements of the kinetics of dipolar solvation have been made. The time resolved Stokes shift of a dye molecule, LDS‐750 was measured using the fluorescence upconversion technique in the solvents acetonitrile, DMSO, nitrobenzene, methanol, and n‐butanol. The solvation dynamics in both aprotic and alcohol solvents occur on a time scale roughly given by the longitudinal relaxation time as predicted by simple continuum theories. The relaxation in nitrobenzene and butanol is nonexponential and the relaxation in methanol is significantly faster than the calculated time. These deviations from simple theory are discussed in the context of (i) the significance of high frequency dispersions in the dielectric response, (ii) translational contributions to the solvent relaxation, and (iii) molecular aspects of the solvation not accounted in the continuum description.

Ionic liquids: structure and photochemical reactions.

Ionic liquids are subjects of intense current interest within the physical chemistry community. A great deal of progress has been made in just the past five years toward identifying the factors that cause these salts to have low melting points and other useful properties. Supramolecular structure and organization have emerged as important and complicated topics that may be key to understanding how chemical reactions and other processes are affected by ionic liquids. New questions are posed, and an active debate is ongoing regarding the nature of nanoscale ordering in ionic liquids. The topic of reactivity in ionic liquids is still relatively unexplored; however, the results that have been obtained indicate that distributed kinetics and dynamical heterogeneity may sometimes, but not always, be influencing factors.

Temperature-dependent structure of methyltributylammonium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)amide: X ray scattering and simulations

We report the combined results of computational and x ray scattering studies of amorphous methyltributylammonium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)amide as a function of temperature. These studies included the temperature range for the normal isotropic liquid, a deeply supercooled liquid and the glass. The low q peaks in the range from 0.3 to 1.5 A(-1) in the structure function of this liquid can be properly accounted for by correlations between first and second nearest neighbors. The lowest q peak can be assigned to real space correlations between ions of the same charge, while the second peak arises mostly from nearest neighbors of opposite charge. Peaks at larger q values are mostly intramolecular in nature. While our simulated structure functions provide an excellent match to our experimental results and our experimental findings agree with previous studies reported for this liquid, the prior interpretation of the experimental data in terms of an interdigitated smectic A phase is not supported by our simulations. In this work, we introduce a set of general theoretical partitions of real and reciprocal space correlations that allow for unambiguous analysis of all intra- and interionic contributions to the structure function and coherent scattering intensity. We find that the intermolecular contributions to the x ray scattering intensity are dominated by the anions and cross terms between cations and anions for this ionic liquid.

Communication: X-ray scattering from ionic liquids with pyrrolidinium cations

We report the structure functions obtained from x-ray scattering experiments on a series of four homologous ionic liquids. The ionic liquids are 1-alkyl-1-methylpyrrolidinium cations paired with the bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)amide anion, with alkyl chain lengths of n = 4, 6, 8, and 10. The structure functions display two intense diffraction peaks for values of the scattering vector q in the range from 0.6 to 1.5 Å(-1) for all samples. Both diffraction peaks shift to lower values of q for increasing temperature. First sharp diffraction peaks are observed in the structure functions for q < 0.5 Å(-1) for liquids with n = 6, 8, and 10.

The dynamics of polar solvation: Inhomogeneous dielectric continuum models

The influence of an inhomogeneous dielectric response on the dynamics of solvation of ions and dipoles is investigated. Solvent models considered include discrete shell models as well as models in which the solvent dielectric constant varies continuously as a function of distance from a spherical solute. The effect of such dielectric inhomogeneity is to introduce additional, slower relaxation times into the solvation response when compared to the homogeneous case. For all models studied, the deviation of the average relaxation time from that predicted for a homogeneous continuum solvent increases as the dielectric constant and the length parameter, which specifies the rapidity of approach to bulk behavior, increase. For a given solvent model the solvation response to a change in a point dipole moment is slower than the response to a charge jump. The continuum results are compared to a recent molecular model based on the mean spherical approximation. The comparison suggests that deviations from homogeneous...

Ultrafast dynamics of pyrrolidinium cation ionic liquids

We have investigated the ultrafast molecular dynamics of five pyrrolidinium cation room temperature ionic liquids using femtosecond optical heterodyne-detected Raman-induced Kerr effect spectroscopy. The ionic liquids studied are N-butyl-N-methylpyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide P14+/NTf2-), N-methoxyethyl-N-methylpyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide P1EOE+/NTf2-), N-ethoxyethyl-N-methylpyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide P1EOE+/NTf2-), N-ethoxyethyl-N-methylpyrrolidinium bromide P1EOE+, and N-ethoxyethyl-N-methylpyrrolidinium dicyanoamide P1EOE+/DCA-). For comparing dynamics among the five ionic liquids, we categorize the ionic liquids into two groups. One group of liquids comprises the three pyrrolidinium cations P14+, P1EOM+, and P1EOE+ paired with the NTf2- anion. The other group of liquids consists of the P1EOE+ cation paired with each of the three anions NTf2-, Br-, and DCA-. The overdamped relaxation for time scales longer than 2 ps has been fit by a triexponential function for each of the five pyrrolidinium ionic liquids. The fast ( approximately 2 ps) and intermediate (approximately 20 ps) relaxation time constants vary little among these five ionic liquids. However, the slow relaxation time constant correlates with the viscosity. Thus, the Kerr spectra in the range from 0 to 750 cm(-1) are quite similar for the group of three pyrrolidinium ionic liquids paired with the NTf2- anion. The intermolecular vibrational line shapes between 0 and 150 cm(-1) are fit to a multimode Brownian oscillator model; adequate fits required at least three modes to be included in the line shape.

Aqueous dimethyl sulfoxide solutions: Inter- and intra-molecular dynamics

The inter- and intra-molecular dynamics of aqueous dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) solutions have been measured using optical heterodyne-detected Raman-induced Kerr effect spectroscopy. Solutions were studied over the entire range of composition at 294 K. The Kerr transients characterize both the underdamped inter- and intra-molecular vibrational motions, as well as the overdamped, diffusive orientational motions. The longer diffusive relaxation time constant τ2 is assigned to DMSO reorientation, and varies strongly with mole fraction of DMSO. The shorter time constant τ1 is assigned to water reorientation, and the value of 1.0 ps is nearly invariant across the range of solution composition. The solutions deviate substantially from hydrodynamic scaling behavior, since the ratio of DMSO reorientation time constant normalized by shear viscosity τ2/η is not a linear function of mole fraction. The peak frequencies for three of five low frequency intramolecular vibrations decrease with increasing water content. Both...

Influence of non-Debye relaxation and of molecular shape on the time dependence of the stokes shift in polar media

We present theoretical analyses of two different aspects of the time dependence of the fluorescence Stokes shift in polar liquids. We show that a small deviation from the Debye form for the dielectric relaxation of the solvent can strongly influence the time evolution of the Stokes shift. Using the Davidson-Cole form for dielectric response we find a stretched exponential time dependence as observed in recent experiments. We also show that the shape of the fluorescing molecule can influence the dynamics of solvation.

Solvation in highly nonideal solutions: A study of aqueous 1-propanol using the coumarin 153 probe

We have investigated the anomalous behavior of aqueous 1-propanol binary solutions using a typical fluorescence probe molecule, coumarin 153. We present data on the fluorescence lifetimes, fluorescence anisotropies, and solvent reorganization dynamics, as well as the steady-state absorption and emission spectra of coumarin 153 in the binary solutions. The rotational diffusion and solvation time constants depend strongly on the content of 1-propanol, especially at low 1-propanol mole fractions. Spectroscopic results presented here are consistent with prior light scattering [G. H. Grosmann and K. H. Ebert, Ber. Bunsenges. Phys. Chem. 85, 1026 (1981)], small angle x-ray scattering [H. Hayashi, K. Nishikawa, and T. Iijima, J. Phys. Chem. 94, 8334 (1990)], and dielectric relaxation [S. Mashimo, T. Umehara, and H. Redlin, J. Chem. Phys. 95, 6257 (1991)] data. The anomalous dynamics features likely arise from the effect of the preferential solvation due to the 1-propanol clustering.