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.

Our Science paper has been highlighted once again, this time on the website Phys.org There is also a news in french on the CNRS INC (Institut National de Chimie) website. We are happy to see the interest it is generating !

A new publication from Guido Pupillo‘s team, in collaboration with us, just appeared in the asap section of ACS Photonics. It shows that, intrinsic surface plasmon-phonon polaritons in a metallic crystal, resulting from hybridized plasmons-phonons modes coupled to photonic degrees of freedom, offer a unique opportunity to control the material properties of the crystal, without the use of an external resonator. More details in the publications page.

Another publication appeared in Physical Review Applied last week ! This study presents a method to measure radiation pressure on metallic nanoparticles down to the thermal limit, with a large dynamic range and fine resolution in position. This is made possible by a careful assessment of the conditions of stability through an Allan-based deviation analysis. The capacity to measure femtonewton forces is important in the context of optical spin-orbit interactions and chiral forces.

This is nor the last trendy horror movie, neither the latest Star Wars episode but just another reaction about our Science paper, now online in the asap section of ACS Central Science. It has been written by Stéphane Kéna-Cohen and Joel Yuen-Zhou and it is entitled Polariton Chemistry : Action in the Dark. The paper is open access (published under ACS Author Choice license) and you can download it here.

Source : ACS Central Science

We are very pleased to announce that our paper previously on ChemrXiv , and resulting from our collaboration with Joseph Moran’s group, has now been published on Science website. We studied the deprotection of a silane derivative bearing two possible silyl bond cleavage sites—Si–C and Si–O respectively, to show that it is possible, thanks to the strong coupling of the vibrational mode associated to one of them, to favor the cleavage of one bond versus the other, and thus the formation of one product of the reaction versus the other. The examination of the thermodynamic parameters reveal the modification of the chemical landscape of the reaction under strong coupling. This brand new approach offers an alternative way to control chemical reactivity without catalysts, prefunctionalization, or chemical changes to the reaction conditions.