Chemical Sustainability Research Theme Seminar

“Here comes the sun, and I say it’s alright” - The line from the famous and comforting Beatles’ song sounds like a perfect slogan for today’s crusade toward a more sustainable world. Sunlight brings a gigantic energy pack, and modern scientists are investing a huge amount of time, resources, and intellectual exercise into best exploiting it. Therefore, the fast-growing number of discoveries on photocatalysis comes as no surprise. Our efforts are lying in the activation of small molecules such as O₂, CO₂ as they are abundant reservoirs of chemical energy. Selective transformation of such molecules into value-added products, as well as developing energy-efficient strategies holds promise for addressing current sustainability issues. Such small molecules, however, feature inert bonds and their activation depends largely on overcoming significant kinetic barriers. New catalytic approaches of small molecule activation and their efficient utilization are therefore of high interest. Additionally, if this can be achieved by the use of visible-light that can strongly enhance sustainability movement. Based on this, we are interested to develop both homogeneous and heterogeneous photocatalysts and recently of single metal atom photocatalysts to obtain visible-light mediated technologies for the sustainable synthesis of fine chemicals, pharmaceuticals and fuels.