Speaker: Professor Patrick Unwin, Professor and Head of the Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick
Electrochemistry is an important, complex and beautiful subject, and a fascinating scientific area to explore! Electrochemical processes and electrified interfaces are at the heart of living systems, batteries, fuel cells and electrolyzers. Electrochemical devices are found in diagnostic and sensor platforms, from measuring glucose in blood, to trace gases in air, and for new generation DNA/RNA sequencing. And there is still much more to learn about electrochemistry.
From the earliest days, electrochemists sought to visualise processes at electrochemical interfaces, and this remains true today; there is an increasing variety of microscopy techniques that have been developed to investigate electrodes and electrified interfaces in-situ and operando. In this lecture, I will concentrate on the main scanned electrochemical probe microscopes that find increasing use in labs around the world. I shall provide a personal perspective on the development of these techniques, their capabilities and highlight key applications, from materials chemistry to biophysical processes at living cells.
A major focus of the lecture will be scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM) and its role at the centre of a multimicroscopy strategy that can be used to dissect structure-activity at the nanoscale in unprecedented detail. Key discoveries from SECCM in fundamental electrochemistry, (electro)catalysis, corrosion, and charge storage will be highlighted, and I shall outline future directions for this technique and its role in a new era of high throughput nanoscale electrochemistry.