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2006 M. T. Thomas Award

Jin Zhao recognized for Outstanding Postdoctoral Achievement

MT Thomas 2007 award recipient

Pictured from left to right are Mike Kluse, M. Tom Thomas, Jin Zhao, Allison Campbell - Director of EMSL, and Hvroje Petek.

Jin Zhao, University of Pittsburgh, has been selected as the 2006 recipient of the M.T. Thomas Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Achievement. This award is in recognition of her seminal contributions to the theory of the unoccupied electronic structure and dynamics of solid-adsorbate interfaces, which are of fundamental importance to geochemistry, atmospheric science, and energy related interfacial phenomena.

Dr. Zhao is a post-doctoral research associate in Professor Hrvoje Petek's group in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Pittsburgh. According to Petek, "Jin, as the lone theorist, has been the cornerstone of all surface science research done in my experimental group for the last 3 years. I could only provide a stream of questions, and a PC to connect to the world, while it was up to her, and she did it brilliantly, to find the theoretical resources and support to chart several new directions in surface science theory." Zhao submitted her first EMSL user proposal in 2005 and was awarded 75,000 hours on EMSL's supercomputer.

Zhao's accomplishments include theoretical description and assignment of partially solvated electronic states at the protic solvent/metal oxide interfaces (H2O)/TiO2 and CH3OH/TiO2). Her theoretical discovery of the so-called "wet electron state" paves the way to understanding how the specific molecule-surface and molecule-molecule interactions define the properties of acceptor states in nonadiabatic electron transfer processes, such as photoinduced charge transfer excitation. Moreover, her theoretical interpretation of the deuterium isotope effect on interfacial electron transfer provides deep insight in proton-coupled electron transfer that is likely to have an important role specifically in the area of surface photocatalysis.

Another area of Zhao's theoretical analysis includes the description of the electronic structure of excess electrons at O atoms vacancy defects, which control the chemical and electronic properties of TiO2 surfaces. As TiO2 has important applications in catalysis, photocatalysis, sensors, and light switchable amphiphilic films, the understanding of how surface defects affect chemical reactivity is an important step in the understanding and expanding of these applications. Zhao has shown that when describing the electronic structure of metal oxides, ad hoc treatments of self-interaction effects can easily lead to incorrect conclusions concerning the extent of electron localization. By constraining her theory with high quality atomic resolution images of the excess electron charge on reduced TiO2 surfaces, she has been able to explore the range of validity of hybrid functional techniques for describing the electronic properties of metal oxide surfaces.

Zhao's work also includes the development of a simple, yet profound, broadly applicable phenomenological theory that explains the period-independent, interfacial electronic structure of alkali atoms. Her work has been the key to understanding the universal binding energy of Li-Cs chemisorbed on copper and silver; it is applicable to and has the potential to provide insight into the design of future molecular electronics devices.

Dr. Zhao obtained her Ph.D. in computational condensed matter physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China in 2003. Dr. Zhao has been a post-doctoral research associate in Professor Hrvoje Petek's group in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Pittsburgh since 2004.

The 2006 M.T. Thomas Award was presented to Dr. Zhao at a ceremony following a presentation of her work on May 24, 2007.

Publications resulting, in part, due to the use of EMSL's supercomputer:

  1. Jin Zhao, Bin Li, Ken Onda, Min Feng and Hrvoje Petek, "Solvated Electrons on Metal Oxide Surfaces", Chem. Rev. 106, 4402 (2006).
  2. Jin Zhao, Bin Li, Kenneth D. Jordan, Jinlong Yang and Hrvoje Petek, "Interplay between Hydrogen Bonding and Electron Solvation on Hydrated TiO2(110)", Phys. Rev. B 73, 195309 (2006).
  3. Taketoshi Minato, Jin Zhao, Yasuyuki Sainoo, Yousoo Kim, Hiroyuki S. Kato, Maki Kawai, Ken-ichi Aika, Jinlong Yang, and Hrvoje Petek, "Correlation between the Lattice Distortion and the Local Electronic Structure at an Atom Vacancy Defect on Titanium Dioxide (110) Surface", Phys. Rev. Lett., submitted.
  4. Jin Zhao, Niko Pontius, Aimo Winklemann, Vahit Sametoglu, Atsushi Kubo, Andrei G. Borisov, Daniel Sanchez Portal, V. M. Silkin, Engene V. Chulkov, Pedro Echenique, and Hrvoje Petek, "The universal electronic structure of alkali atom/metal interface", Science, submitted.