Surface-Bulk Correlation Spectroscopy for the Determination of Adsorption Preference in Mixtures
- PC Department Seminar
- Date: Apr 15, 2026
- Time: 11:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Dennis Hore
- University of Victoria, Canada
- Location: Building G
- Room: 2.06
- Host: Martin Thämer
- Topic: Discussion and debate formats, lectures
The adsorption of molecules onto surfaces from the bulk liquid phase is a critical feature of industrial and biological fouling, the compatibility of materials for medical implants, and a host of environmental processes on mineral surfaces. Surfaces have a propensity to pre-concentrate adsorbates due to their specific interactions, thereby resulting in reactivity that may be substantially different from what the same molecules encounter in the bulk liquid phase.
It is therefore of interest to determine the surface preference of a particular adsorbate, to know whether it is more favourably adsorbed. Vibrational sum-frequency generation has the advantage of being a label-free technique on account of its intrinsic molecular specificity, and can isolate contributions from surfaces due its symmetry-breaking requirement as a second-order nonlinear optical phenomenon. This presentation will illustrate how this technique may be used in combination with IR absorption and/or Raman scattering to determine the surface excess for a binary mixture.