Vibrational Strong Coupling for Reaction Control

Widely used catalysts, such as platinum, are rare, expensive, and their mining is a burden to our environment. An exciting new direction is to control the speed of reactions by coupling IR resonator structures strongly to vibrational modes of the reactive molecules or the solvent in which they are swimming. Pioneering experiments demonstrated the ability to inhibit, catalyse, or steer a reaction or crystalization process. Our group aims to develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanism and predict promising new applications.

Starting point for the interested reader: (Schäfer et al., 2022) (Schäfer et al., 2024) (Schäfer, 2022)