Prof. George C. Schatz

Guest Introduction

George C. Schatz is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He also has a courtesy appointment in Chemical and Biological Engineering and is associated with the Applied Physics Program. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Clarkson University and a Ph.D. at Caltech. He was a postdoc at MIT, and has been at Northwestern since 1976. Schatz is a theoretician who studies the optical, structural and thermal properties of nanomaterials, including plasmonic nanoparticles, plasmonic metamaterials, DNA and peptide nanostructures, and carbon-based materials. He has contributed to theories of dynamical processes, including gas phase and gas/surface reactions, energy transfer processes, transport phenomena and photochemistry.

Prof. Schatz has published three books and over 1000 papers in the past years. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, and he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry since 2005. The awards he has obtained include Sloan and Dreyfus Fellowships, the Fresenius Award of Phi Lambda Upsilon, the Max Planck Research Award, the Bourke Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Ver Steeg Fellowship of Northwestern University, the Feynman Prize of the Foresight Institute, the Herschbach Medal, the Debye Award of the ACS, the S F Boys-A Rahman Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Hirschfelder Award of the University of Wisconsin, the Mulliken Medal of the University of Chicago, and the Langmuir Award of the ACS. 

Prof. Schatz is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society and of the AAAS. In 2010 he appeared on the Times Higher Education list of Top 100 Chemists of the Past Decade, and in 2014 he was on the Thompson-Reuters list of highest cited scientists. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society, and of the Chemical Research Society of India.

Lecture Detail

The talk delivered by Prof. Schatz mainly focused on two general directions of research where quantum mechanics and plasmonics are coupled together, from the theoretical point of view.

In the lecture

One direction involves the use of electronic structure theory to describe the plasmonic excited states of metal clusters, and their spectroscopic and chemical properties. Electronic structure methods such as time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) were used to describe plasmonic excitation in clusters of silver atoms with 10-200 atoms about a decade ago. The TDDFT method was recently applied to understand surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) of bipyridine on Au nanospheres excited at two different wavelengths, where electrons were liberated from the Au nanospheres when they were excited at 532 nm. The method was also applied to model hot electron chemistry involving H2 dissociation. Prof. Schatz then discussed an improved INDO-based method that generated a more meaningful description than the previous TDDFT method of both the electromagnetic and chemical mechanisms of SERS and the tip-enhanced variant, TERS. This latest approach can be used to mimic TERS electrochemistry experiments with single molecules.

In another direction, Prof. Schatz and co-workers have recently developed a method for calculating the rate of energy transfer between donor and acceptor molecules that are in the presence of a complex dispersive dielectric medium that can include plasmonic nanoparticles. This method involves full quantum electrodynamics, but the computational effort is simply that of a standard classical Maxwell equation solver, such as the finite different time-domain method. They applied this approach to plasmon-mediated energy transfer, where the rates can be enhanced by orders of magnitude compared to standard energy transfer dynamics in the absence of nanoparticles.

Lastly, Prof. Schatz talked about a new direction where his group examined two photon absorption and related energy transfer processes that involve two entangled photons. They demonstrate that entanglement can greatly enhance these processes, making them have rates comparable to one-photon processes.

Q&A Session

In this Q&A Session, the audience showed high enthusiasm about Prof. Schatz’s presentation. They asked a good number of questions regarding the various processes that involved plasmonics. Prof. Schatz gave insightful explanations of the processes, and also discussed the theoretical models in more details.

Idea exchanging 

Finally,  Prof. Xueming Yang presented the honorary certificate of SUSTech to Prof. George C. Schatz as an expression of our gratitude for the wonderful speech.

Prof. Xueming Yang and Prof. George C. Schatz