High-Pressure CO Electroreduction at Silver Produces Ethanol and Propanol.

Reducing CO to long-chain carbon products is attractive considering such products are typically more valuable than shorter ones. However, the best electrocatalyst for making such products from CO , copper, lacks selectivity. By studying alternate C producing catalysts we can increase our mechanistic understanding, which is beneficial for improving catalyst performance.

NEXAFS spectroscopy of ionic liquids: experiments versus calculations.

Experimental near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectra are reported for 12 ionic liquids (ILs) encompassing a range of chemical structures for both the sulfur 1s and nitrogen 1s edges and compared with time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations. The energy scales for the experimental data were carefully calibrated against literature data. Gas phase calculations were performed on lone ions, ion pairs and ion pair dimers, with a wide range of ion pair conformers considered.

Atomic charges of sulfur in ionic liquids: experiments and calculations.

Experimental near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectra, X-ray photoelectron (XP) spectra and Auger electron spectra are reported for sulfur in ionic liquids (ILs) with a range of chemical structures. These values provide experimental measures of the atomic charge in each IL and enable the evaluation of the suitability of NEXAFS spectroscopy and XPS for probing the relative atomic charge of sulfur. In addition, we use Auger electron spectroscopy to show that when XPS binding energies differ by less than 0.