Charge Transfer across Liquid—Liquid Interfaces

Abstract

Although electrochemical studies of the interface between two immiscible electrolyte solutions (ITIES) started at the beginning of the century, this field of electrochemistry has remained in the background for a long time. The breakthrough came only in the early 1970s when Gavach and his colleagues in Montpellier (France) demonstrated that this type of interface could be polarized,1 and that the Galvani potential difference between the two phases could be used as a driving force for charge transfer reactions. There are basically two types of reactions that can be driven electrochemically: (1) ion transfer and (2) electron transfer. Historically, most of the work was concerned with the study of ion transfer and facilitated ion transfer reactions, as those were readily amenable to experimental investigations. The principal obstacle to the study of electron transfer reactions has been the difficulty in identifying redox couples for which the products of the electron transfer reactions would not cross the interface, thereby generating ionic transfer currents that would impede the measurements.KeywordsTransfer ReactionElectron Transfer ReactionPhotoinduced Electron TransferStandard Gibbs EnergyCharge Transfer ReactionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.