Lighting the way to optimal photocatalysis

One afternoon, MSE’s Mohammad Islam walked into colleague Paul Salvador’s office and asked what the biggest problem was in photocatalysis that he’d like to be able to solve. Salvador’s answer: He’d like to determine how the oxidation and reduction reactions in photocatalysis could be separated into distinct channels in order to increase performance. Thus was formed a team including Islam, Salvador, and MSE Head Greg Rohrer, with Ph.D. student Hang-Ah Park, master’s student Siyuan Liu, and former postdoc Youngseok Oh (currently a senior scientist at the Korea Institute of Materials Science). Recently, the team published a paper on their new approach to optimizing photocatalysts. Like many Carnegie Mellon research projects, the project started with a problem that could only be solved through collaboration. read more

*also cited: Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-optimal-photocatalysis.html