Author Spotlight: Tracking Electrochemistry on Single Nanoparticles with Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Spectroscopy and Microscopy

A common theme in our research is using light matter interactions and electrical energy to measure, drive, and control interfacial chemical transformations at the nanoscale. In particular, we seek to understand how local environments and reaction intermediates affect selectivity in electric catalysis. Catalytic transformations are traditionally evaluated with ensemble average measurements of the products and the catalyst attributes.

The frontier challenges to produce chemical products selectively include reducing this measurement averaging while maintaining the measurement sensitivity, so that we can better understand the actions of individual molecules in the reactive sites of the catalyst. Electrochemical techniques alone do not provide any chemical information on species that form and transform at the electrode surface. Our protocol enables electrochemical measurements at a single nanoparticle using vibrational spectroscopy as a readout, enabling correlations between electrochemical processes and molecular changes.

Moving forward, our laboratory will continue to push the boundaries of measurement resolution and space and time to understand chemical and material processes at the single-molecule level and at the timescale of chemical reactions.