Rudolph A. Marcus

Rudolph Arthur Marcus ( born July 21, 1923 in Montreal, Canada) is an American chemist. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer in chemical systems. See Marcus theory.

Biography

Rudolph Arthur Marcus was born in Montreal, Canada, where he studied at McGill University, where he also completed his PhD in 1946. In 1958 he went to the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn as a professor of chemistry. In 1964 he moved to the University of Illinois in Urbana and in 1978 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Work

Rudolph A. Marcus worked from 1956 to 1965 primarily due to the transfer of electrons between two molecular states, which are located in a polar or polarizable solvents. Using simple mathematical equations he could explain this process and describe, creating a basis for the experimental work, the chemical was created and was found an explanatory model for chemical processes. An important result was the finding that the high-dimensional potential energy surface of the system, which arises due to the large number of solvent molecules and their degrees of freedom by a parabolic potential can (similar to the harmonic oscillator ) describe along a Kollektivkoordinate q. The basic assumption of this approach is that the distortion of the solvent by the charge shift with the wind a spring can equate. Although simple, this model has proven itself for a variety of systems. Even by slight modifications of the charge transfer could be described at interfaces, which plays a major role, for example, for electrolytic reactions.