All are welcome to attend a seminar presented by chemistry alum Neal Abrams '00. The event, which takes place Tuesday, November 4, at 4:30 p.m., will take place in the Center for Natural Sciences, room 333.
Abrams will present a lecture, "New Methods Towards the Synthesis of Oxynitride Compounds."
Synopsis
A variety of engineering solutions have been put into to place to increase the efficiency of current water-splitting systems, but there are still a variety of unexplored synthetic approaches to solve this problem. The capture and conversion of solar energy requires a photocatalyst able to efficiently absorb photons in the visible region.
For solar energy to be a viable power source to split water, it is necessary to synthesize photocatalysts with smaller bandgaps that can absorb a larger region of the visible spectrum. By incorporating nitrogen into known semiconducting oxide compounds, the region of light absorption shifts from a sparsely populated ultraviolet region to the photon-rich visible region.
These oxynitride compounds offer advantages of being relatively stable and ecofriendly materials. They also have a smaller bandgap in comparison to their full-oxide counterparts and increased stability versus the full-nitride.
This talk will discuss current research in water-splitting photocatalysts as well as rational synthetic routes to metastable oxynitride materials through low-temperature routes.
