2022 Annual Meeting
Accelerating an SN2 Reaction Using Electric Fields in a Scanning Tunneling Microscope Break-Junction (STM-BJ)
Electric fields have been utilized to control and tune chemical reactions in bioenzymatic catalysis, where enzymes exert electric fields in their active-site environments to achieve rapid reaction rates. An ongoing challenge is to develop synthetic conditions that match enzymatic rates. The Venkataraman group has shown that electric fields can induce organic reactions inside the scanning tunneling microscope break-junction (STM-BJ)1.This project is the first to use this technique to examine electric-field catalytic effects on an SN2 reaction. Previous computational studies2have predicted that electric fields may catalyze this reaction in solution, yet herein we offer the first experimental rate study of the Menshutkin reaction at ambient temperatures with STM-BJ measurements. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and UV-vis analysis is utilized for ex-situ rate characterization, and density-functional theory (DFT) calculations provide support for product stabilization in a field. We aim to show that SN2 Menshutkin reaction may be driven as the result of an applied electric field and solvent dielectric constants.