The Role of Interfaces for Chemical Transformations and Transport under Confinement

Chemical transformations, selectivity, and transport rarely occur in a single homogeneous aqueous phase, but instead occur in niches, crevices, and impurity sites at confining interfaces between two or more phases of gases, liquids or solids. The effects of confinement are ubiquitously present across diverse fields spanning nanochemistry and chemical catalysis, environmental and energy sciences, geosciences, and functional materials. Fundamentally, confinement at interfaces alters water and solution compositions and phases to reformulate the thermodynamics of selectivity, transition states and pathways of chemical reactions, nucleation events, and kinetic barriers for transport. I will provide three different examples of theoretical studies of confinement around anhydrous clays, synthetic enzymes, and a general non-equilibrium phenomena of confinement which we refer to as dynamical inversion of the energy landscape.