We are pleased to announce that a new publication, in cooperation with Vladimir Torbeev group, has just been accepted in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. This time we applied the concept of strong-coupling induced cooperative effect to a biological molecule, the pepsin, which is a digestive enzyme. When strongly coupling the OH stretching bond of the water surrounding pepsin (and involved in its chemical mechanism), the enzyme activity, characterized by fluorescence spectroscopy, is modified. Being able to alter the energy landscape of biological molecules opens a new and promising way to studies on biochemical reactivity. The paper is open access and has been tagged as VIP paper. You can also download it in our Publications page.

ChemRxiv highlighted five papers among the 2200 deposited during the last two years, among which one of us, the Science paper about ground state chemical reactivity !

Dr Jino George is now leading his group at IISER Mohali but still collaborating with the lab and we are pleased to announce that our paper, previously on ChemArXiv is now accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie. It reports the solvolysis of PNPA catalysed by vibrational strong coupling (VSC) under cooperative strong coupling effect between the reactant and the solvent molecules. More precisely, when the solvent and reactant have the same vibrational bands, but only the solvent is at a concentration high enough to be strongly coupled to the cavity mode, the reaction rate is increased by one order of magnitude at room temperature. These results offer an exciting perspective for the control of chemical reactivity under VSC regime.

We added two more papers in our publications page.

One is a recent review written by two groups of ISIS (ours and Thomas Hermans one), including also three researchers from United-Kingdom and Sweden. It deals with the mechanical separation of chiral objects, in particular at the colloidal scale and the way of achieving it by new methods.

The second presents the results of a collaboration, this time with theoreticians colleagues of the DYNO group at IPMCS and a mathematician from NYU Shangaï. It proposes to control the dynamics of a stochastic system from one thermal equilibrium to another, via some optimized protocols that are tested experimentally on a particle in an optical trap.