Radicals

Radicals drive many chemical processes in our atmosphere as well as on earth. As highly reactive species, they deteriorate man-made and natural molecular systems alike. They form during aging and accelerate degradation, being it in organic electronic devices or in a biological cell, where membrane or genome integrity are compromised. At the same time, we start recognizing the virtue of radicals, in situations where the radical species and their fate can be controlled and functionally harnessed, and biology shows fascinating examples of this functional role of radicals as sensors or signals. At the MPIP, we develop new experimental and simulation tools to predict, produce and detect radicals and radical processes, with the ultimate aim to understand and design molecular systems that control, combat or sense radicals with unprecedented precision.

Key challenges include detecting and interfering with mechanoradicals and other sources of oxidative stress in biology, mitigating the degradation of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) by radicals, and designing nanodiamonds with specific lattice defects and sensing properties for applications in biology and materials science. We plan to leverage the synergies between these disparate molecular systems by sharing concepts and jointly developing technologies. Importantly, we develop multiscale physical simulations and machine learning methods to predict radical reactions in complex molecular systems and new sensors based on nanodiamonds that allow the detection of single radical species in a label-free setting. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry are shared facilities to analyze radical species and detect degradation products.

These efforts also represent a joint research focus across the wider Max Planck Campus. The MPIC studies radical chemistry in the atmosphere as well as the radical biochemistry of the lung caused by nanoparticles and other pollutants of the air, questions that can profit from MPIP’s simulation and detection methods and that are tightly linked to the radical biochemistry researched at MPIP.