Jose Luis Pérez Lustres has been session chair and invited speaker at the Symposium "Photoinduced Proton Transfer in Chemistry and Biology". He has reported on the mechanism of proton transfer to solvent reactions.
The symposium has been organized by the American Chemical Society as part of the 248th National Meeting (San Francisco, 10-14 August 2014). The Physical Chemistry Division of the ACS selects each year a series of relevant topics, which are discussed multidisplinarly by scientists from all over the world. This time, the Proton Transfer Symposium debates about reaction mechanisms and environmental effects. Our understanding of this process has rapidly evolved in light of new examples of proton transfer reactions in complex biological media and, mainly, by the attainment of increasingly high spectro-temporal resolution. In parallel, promising applications such as pH-jump by optical excitation of molecular probes or optical activity depending on photoinduced prototropism have emerged.
The contribution of the Biophysical Chemistry, Photophysics and Spectroscopy Group has focussed on the identification of the proton-transfer-to-solvent elementary steps: solvent relaxation, bond break and diffusional separation of reaction products. Several examples illustrate limitting cases.
