Magnetoelectrocatalysis and electrochemistry of redox-active transition metal complexes

We spend time every day waiting for our phones, computers, and cars to power on. Once on, we expect the computer in our car to tell us when a person is walking behind us, and we expect our phone to tell us how fast we can get home. Usually, we only pay attention to how long we wait if we’re expecting an important call or running late to a meeting. In chemistry, sometimes we are really interested in why things take so long; why does it take so long to power on my phone? Why does this chemical reaction happen slowly? What can we do to make this go faster with less stuff? In this work, electricity and chemistry are used together to study what can be done at key places along a reaction to make it better. We used new and known combinations of metals and other groups of elements together to make chemical reactions faster, and to make them happen the same way every time. In some cases, we used known groups of elements in a different way to make other known things work better. Other times, we used magnets together with these groups of elements to make things work better than before. By using electricity and chemistry together, while changing key pieces at different times, we spent less money than before, the studies took less time, and made more product. This work describes studies relevant to improved technologies and catalysts.