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Description
The disordered nature of glass-forming melts results in two features for its dynamics i.e. non-Arrhenius and non-exponential behavior. Their macroscopic properties are studied through observing spatial heterogeneity of the molecular relaxation. Experiments performed in a low-frequency range tracks the flow of energy in time on slow degrees of freedom and

The disordered nature of glass-forming melts results in two features for its dynamics i.e. non-Arrhenius and non-exponential behavior. Their macroscopic properties are studied through observing spatial heterogeneity of the molecular relaxation. Experiments performed in a low-frequency range tracks the flow of energy in time on slow degrees of freedom and transfer to the vibrational heat bath of the liquid, as is the case for microwave heating. High field measurements on supercooled liquids result in generation of fictive temperatures of the absorbing modes which eventually result in elevated true bath temperatures. The absorbed energy allows us to quantify the changes in the 'configurational', real sample, and electrode temperatures. The slow modes absorb energy on the structural relaxation time scale causing the increase of configurational temperature resulting in the rise of dielectric loss. Time-resolved high field dielectric relaxation experiments show the impact of 'configurational heating' for low frequencies of the electric field and samples that are thermally clamped to a thermostat. Relevant thermal behavior of monohydroxy alcohols is considerably different from the cases of simple non-associating liquids, due to their distinct origins of the prominent dielectric loss. Monohydroxy alcohols display very small changes due to observed nonthermal effects without increasing sample temperature. These changes have been reflected in polymers in our measurements.
ContributorsPathak, Ullas (Author) / Richert, Ranko (Thesis advisor) / Dai, Lenore (Thesis advisor) / Nielsen, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Transient molecules are of great importance having proposed applications in quantum science and technology and tests of fundamental physics. In the present dissertation, the transient molecules studied are SrOH, ThF, ThCl, YbF and YbOH; each having been selected because of their proposed application. Specifically, SrOH is a candidate of constructing

Transient molecules are of great importance having proposed applications in quantum science and technology and tests of fundamental physics. In the present dissertation, the transient molecules studied are SrOH, ThF, ThCl, YbF and YbOH; each having been selected because of their proposed application. Specifically, SrOH is a candidate of constructing a molecular magneto-optical trap (MOT). The simple actinide molecules, ThF and ThCl, were selected as ligand bonding model systems to gain insight into chemical processing of Spent Nuclear Fuel. The lanthanides YbF and YbOH are venues for the determination of electron electric dipole moment (eEDM) and the studies in this dissertation provide the requisite properties for those experiments.

Intense supersonic molecular beams of these transient molecules were generated via laser ablation and spectroscopically characterized using a novel medium-resolution two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopic approach, as well as high-resolution laser induced fluorescence (LIF). The 2D medium resolution approach, which was used in the studies SrOH, ThF, ThCl and YbOH, uses a multiplexing method that simultaneously records dispersed fluorescence and excitation spectra. A significant advantage of 2D-LIF imaging is that all the electronics states can be targeted to determine the electronics states and associated vibrational spacing individually. Consequently, in the 2D spectra of ThF, ThCl and YbOH, several previously unobserved band systems have been detected in one single scan. For the DF spectra of SrOH and YbOH, the determined branching ratios show that the transitions of these molecules are diagonal (i.e. Δv=0), which is essential for the proposed potential for laser cooling. In the high-resolution of YbF, ThF, ThCl and SrOH optical spectra were recorded to an accuracy of ±30 MHz, which represents an unprecedented precision of 1:10+8.

In addition to field free spectra, optical Stark and Zeeman studies were performed to determine the most fundamental magneto-and electro-static properties. Effective Hamiltonian operators were employed to analyze the recorded spectra and determine the spectroscopic parameters. This data set also establishes a contribution toward developing new computational methodologies for treating relativistic effects and electron correlation.
ContributorsNguyen, Duc Trung (Author) / Steimle, Timothy C (Thesis advisor) / Richert, Ranko (Committee member) / Chizmeshya, Andrew V.G. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
How water behaves at interfaces is relevant to many scientific and technological applications; however, many subtle phenomena are unknown in aqueous solutions. In this work, interfacial structural transition in hydration shells of a polarizable solute at critical polarizabilities is discovered. The transition is manifested in maximum water response, the reorientation

How water behaves at interfaces is relevant to many scientific and technological applications; however, many subtle phenomena are unknown in aqueous solutions. In this work, interfacial structural transition in hydration shells of a polarizable solute at critical polarizabilities is discovered. The transition is manifested in maximum water response, the reorientation of the water dipoles at the interface, and an increase in the density of dangling OH bonds. This work also addresses the role of polarizability of the active site of proteins in biological catalytic reactions. For proteins, the hydration shell becomes very heterogeneous and involves a relatively large number of water molecules. The molecular dynamics simulations show that the polarizability, along with the atomic charge distribution, needs to be a part of the picture describing how enzymes work. Non Gaussian dynamics in time-resolved linear and nonlinear (correlation) 2D spectra are also analyzed.



Additionally, a theoretical formalism is presented to show that when preferential orientations of water dipoles exist at the interface, electrophoretic charges can be produced without free charge carriers, i.e., neutral solutes can move in a constant electric field due to the divergence of polarization at the interface. Furthermore, the concept of interface susceptibility is introduced. It involves the fluctuations of the surface charge density caused by thermal motion and its correlation over the characteristic correlation length with the fluctuations of the solvent charge density. Solvation free energy and interface dielectric constant are formulated accordingly. Unlike previous approaches, the solvation free energy scales quite well in a broad range of ion sizes, namely in the range of 2-14 A° . Interface dielectric constant is defined such that the boundary conditions in the Laplace equation describing a micro- or mesoscopic interface are satisfied. The effective dielectric constant of interfacial water is found to be significantly lower than its bulk value. Molecular dynamics simulation results show that the interface dielectric constant for a TIP3P water model changes from nine to four when the effective solute radius is increased from 5 A° to 18 A° . The small value of the interface dielectric constant of water has potentially dramatic consequences for hydration.
ContributorsDinpajooh, Mohammadhasan (Author) / Matyushov, Dmitry V (Thesis advisor) / Richert, Ranko (Committee member) / Beckstein, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This study aims to address the deficiencies of the Marcus model of electron transfer

(ET) and then provide modifications to the model. A confirmation of the inverted energy

gap law, which is the cleanest verification so far, is presented for donor-acceptor complexes.

In addition to the macroscopic properties of the solvent, the physical

This study aims to address the deficiencies of the Marcus model of electron transfer

(ET) and then provide modifications to the model. A confirmation of the inverted energy

gap law, which is the cleanest verification so far, is presented for donor-acceptor complexes.

In addition to the macroscopic properties of the solvent, the physical properties of the solvent

are incorporated in the model via the microscopic solvation model. For the molecules

studied in this dissertation, the rate constant first increases with cooling, in contrast to the

prediction of the Arrhenius law, and then decreases at lower temperatures. Additionally,

the polarizability of solute, which was not considered in the original Marcus theory, is included

by the Q-model of ET. Through accounting for the polarizability of the reactants, the

Q-model offers an important design principle for achieving high performance solar energy

conversion materials. By means of the analytical Q-model of ET, it is shown that including

molecular polarizability of C60 affects the reorganization energy and the activation barrier

of ET reaction.

The theory and Electrochemistry of Ferredoxin and Cytochrome c are also investigated.

By providing a new formulation for reaction reorganization energy, a long-standing disconnect

between the results of atomistic simulations and cyclic voltametery experiments is

resolved. The significant role of polarizability of enzymes in reducing the activation energy

of ET is discussed. The binding/unbinding of waters to the active site of Ferredoxin leads

to non-Gaussian statistics of energy gap and result in a smaller activation energy of ET.

Furthermore, the dielectric constant of water at the interface of neutral and charged

C60 is studied. The dielectric constant is found to be in the range of 10 to 22 which is

remarkably smaller compared to bulk water( 80). Moreover, the interfacial structural

crossover and hydration thermodynamic of charged C60 in water is studied. Increasing the

charge of the C60 molecule result in a dramatic structural transition in the hydration shell,

which lead to increase in the population of dangling O-H bonds at the interface.
ContributorsWaskasi, Morteza M (Author) / Matyushov, Dmitry (Thesis advisor) / Richert, Ranko (Committee member) / Heyden, Matthias (Committee member) / Beckstein, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
We studied the relationship between the polarizability and the molecular conductance

that arises in the response of a molecule to an external electric field. To illustrate

the plausibility of the idea, we used Simmons' tunneling model, which describes image

charge and dielectric effects on electron transport through a barrier. In such a

model, the

We studied the relationship between the polarizability and the molecular conductance

that arises in the response of a molecule to an external electric field. To illustrate

the plausibility of the idea, we used Simmons' tunneling model, which describes image

charge and dielectric effects on electron transport through a barrier. In such a

model, the barrier height depends on the dielectric constant of the electrode-molecule-electrode junction, which in turn can be approximately expressed in terms of the

molecular polarizability via the classical Clausius-Mossotti relation. In addition to

using the tunneling model, the validity of the relationships between the molecular

polarizability and the molecular conductance was tested by comparing calculated

and experimentally measured conductance of different chemical structures ranging

from covalent bonded to non-covalent bonded systems. We found that either using

the tunneling model or the first-principle calculated quantities or experimental data,

the conductance decreases as the molecular polarizability increases. In contrast to

this strong correlation, our results showed that in some cases there was a weaker or

none correlation between the conductance and other molecular electronic properties

including HOMO-LUMO gap, chemical geometries, and interactions energies. All

these results together suggest that using the molecular polarizability as a molecular

descriptor for conductance can offer some advantages compared to using other

molecular electronic properties and can give additional insight about the electronic

transport property of a junction.

These results also show the validity of the physically intuitive picture that to a first

approximation a molecule in a junction behaves as a dielectric that is polarized in the

opposite sense of the applied bias, thereby creating an interfacial barrier that hampers

tunneling. The use of the polarizability as a descriptor of molecular conductance offers

signicant conceptual and practical advantages over a picture based in molecular

orbitals. Despite the simplicity of our model, it sheds light on a hitherto neglected

connection between molecular polarizability and conductance and paves the way for

further conceptual and theoretical developments.

The results of this work was sent to two publications. One of them was accepted

in the International Journal of Nanotechnology (IJNT) and the other is still under

review in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
ContributorsVatan Meidanshahi, Reza (Author) / Mujica, Vladimiro (Thesis advisor) / Chizmeshya, Andrew (Committee member) / Richert, Ranko (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014