KubarychGroup

 

“Vibrational Resonance Imaging”

 

Solvation Dynamics

Watching the First Solvation Shell

light

The shape of the signal tells us that the solvent shell molecules are actually aligned with the dye in the ground state.

Dynamic Stark Effect

 

All reactions in solution involve complicated, yet critical interactions between the species undergoing reaction and the surrounding solvent. It has long been known that the first solvation shell is responsible for the vast majority of relevant dynamics, but due to the small number of solvent molecules there relative to the bulk, it has been essentially impossible to study these key reaction participants. A new method developed by our group is able to track specifically those molecules in the first solvation shell, watching them much as a magnetic resonance imager maps the correlation between proton resonance frequency and inhomogeneous magnetic fields.