Jiang wins Richard P. Van Duyne Award
The American Chemical Society announced Nan Jiang was selected as the winner of prestigious Richard P. Van Duyne Award (formerly the Early-Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry) (http://phys-acs.org/all-winners/). He will present an award talk during the 2022 Fall ACS National Meeting in Chicago.
In addition, Prof. Jiang's recent JACS paper (10.1021/jacs.1c11547) has been highlighted as a JACS cover story, in C&EN news, and by the NSF Chemistry Division (CHE). In this study, the Jiang group demonstrated that the controlled site-selective activation of one chemical bond, in presence of multiple chemically equivalent sites within a single molecule, can be achieved by utilizing the surface plasmons that are confined at the scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) tip apex (on the order of < 1 nm). They revealed that each molecular site activation leads to the C―Si bond dissociation from a single 5,10,15,20-(tetra-trimethylsilylethynyl) porphyrin (TMSEP) molecule on a Cu(100) surface that can be visualized by STM imaging. Density functional theory (DFT) modeling is in agreement with the conclusion that C―Si bond dissociation occurs without disturbing the adjacent carbon-carbon triple bond. Furthermore, with such an atomistic process, multiple reactive sites can be activated sequentially from a single molecular precursor, and different sets of products are created. This method can be used to tailor-make nanoscale molecular structures and to mediate chemical reactions that are inaccessible via standard thermal means. You can read the C&EN news here: https://cen.acs.org/materials/photonics/Surface-plasmons-drive-single-bond/100/i3