Abstract: Critical elements are essential for the manufacture of energy and quantum devices. Increasing productivity in an environmentally friendly way requires fundamental understanding and innovation in separation processes. Crystalline inorganic materials, as rigid matrix for ions, open new opportunities for separation. Enthalpy-driven processes can be leveraged to overcome the entropic penalty associated with demixing. In this talk, I will introduce our group’s efforts to create materials platforms that can be used as solid ionic channels with Angstrom-scale confinement. We reveal the importance of the channel materials' structural features and responses in dialing the energy differences along the transport pathway for separation. Additionally, when ion transport is associated with electron transfer and valence changes in the solid materials, the crystal symmetry and vacancy levels become critical in governing the energy landscape. Due to the coexistence of many ions in aqueous environments, spectator ions, interestingly, can play a very important role in determining the competition for target ions.

Bio: Chong Liu graduated from Fudan University with a Chemistry major in 2009. She did her Ph.D. at Stanford Materials Science and Engineering during 2009-2015 with Prof. Yi Cui and her postdoc in the Physics Department at Stanford University from 2015-2018 with Prof. Steven Chu. She joined the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in 2018 as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor. She is named a Sloan Research Fellow and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. She is a recipient of the DOE Early Career Award and MIT TR35 Award. She is one of the 2024 Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers. Chong is currently the Thrust Leader of AMEWS EFRC Center. Her research focuses on designing and synthesizing materials and developing electrochemical and optical tools to address the challenges in water and energy. Her group studies phenomena that span enormous length scales from molecular interaction to mass transport, aiming to understand and correlate the materials' microscopic properties to macroscopic performance.