Professor Claudio Margulis

Professor Claudio Margulis
Department of Chemistry
University of Iowa
Printable Abstract

Ionic Liquids (ILs) and molten salts (MSs) are exciting materials for energy applications that include batteries and nuclear energy. This talk will survey what I think are some of the main areas associated with their microscopic structure and structural dynamics. Some aspects are by now well understood, but new frontiers have emerged including but not limited to how liquid structure affects transport, and even the nature of experimentally proposed liquid-liquid transitions. High-temperature melts of multivalent ions are very intriguing as they can also display intermediate range order. Particularly interesting is the role of chloro-basicity in these systems; for example, the transport of gas species such as Cl2 can be vehicular or Grotthus-like (see Figure 1) depending on it. If time allows, I will also discuss the fate of radiation products such as electrons in some of these systems.

Figure 1: Mechanism of diffusion of Cl3- in the eutectic mixture of LiCl/KCl from “Chlorine gas and anion radical reactivity in molten salts and the link to chlorobasicity” Hung H. Nguyen, Luke D. Gibson, Matthew S. Emerson, Bichitra Borah, Santanu Roy, Vyacheslav S. Bryantsev and  Claudio J. Margulis  (just published Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics https://doi.org/10.1039/D4CP03285C ).

Claudio Margulis

Claudio J. Margulis is a Professor and Associate Chair of Chemistry at the University of Iowa. His undergraduate degree is from Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) where he did research on ions in steam, his Ph.D. is from Boston University where he worked on non-adiabatic quantum dynamics, and his postdoctoral work is from Columbia University where he worked on multiple different areas including the hydrophobic effect, quantum excited states, and commenced his work on ionic liquids. He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient and a Kavli Fellow; most recently he delivered the Spiers Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. Research in the Margulis group is theoretical and computational, although students may venture out and also perform some experiments. The focus of his group’s work through the years has been on the statistical and quantum mechanics of liquids, with an emphasis on ionic liquids and molten salts. Specifically, they work on the structure and structural dynamics of ionic systems in the condensed phase and at interfaces, including the interpretation of scattering and spectroscopy experiments.

Hosted by Professor Ilja Siepmann.