Title: Professor & Recent Alums Publish Article
Research from the lab of Dr. Mark P. Heitz, in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, was just published, in a December 2021 article titled “Coumarin 153 Dynamics in Ethylammonium Nitrate: The Effects of Dilution with Methanol”.
This article communicated continuing research on ionic liquids touted to be a (relatively) new class of environmentally friendly ‘green’ alternative solvents. Research efforts in the Heitz lab are, in part, focused on understanding the effects of cosolvent addition on ionic liquid structure and how varying the solution composition affects the resulting molecular interactions. In this work, we used time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to measure the molecular dynamics of a fluorescent probe molecule on the picosecond time scale (0.00000000001 s) to determine the how the resulting solute-solvent interactions influenced probe mobility. Understanding how these fundamental interactions govern molecular processes in cosolvent solutions is important since ionic liquids find application in a myriad of fields such as developing alternative energies, improved battery technologies, biomolecule storage and preservation, and ‘green’ chemical synthesis.