Advances in Nanoengineering seminar – November 3, 2026
We cordially invite you to Advances in Nanoengineering seminar, which will be held on November 3, 2026 at 13.15 in room 321, building A-1, where
Dr Andrzej Nowok
from Department of Experimental Physics, Wrocław Tech
will deliver a lecture titled: Molecular-Scale Insights into Organic Cation Dynamics in Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Compounds
The lecture abstract is attached below.
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The interaction of an external electric field with hybrid organic-inorganic compounds reveals complex molecular phenomena that current models fail to explain. It is generally understood that applying an electric field causes polar building blocks within a crystal lattice to reorient, giving rise to the so-called dielectric relaxation. One might expect that thermal expansion or mechanical pressure would significantly affect molecular dynamics of such components by changing unit-cell volumes and internal hydrogen bonding networks. However, our recent empirical dielectric studies present a striking paradox: the energy barriers (known as activation energies) controlling organic cation dynamics remain independent from temperature and unit-cell volume changes at ambient pressure. Furthermore, this dynamics shows negligible sensitivity to external pressure even though hybrid organic-inorganic compounds are known for their remarkable softness. Consequently, molecular dynamics of cage cations do not really follow changes in unit-cell volume, hydrogen-bond distances or even crystal symmetry.
This presentation summarizes all these contradictions and demonstrates that the organic cation dynamics is governed by a delicate balance of thermodynamics and kinetics, where structural disorder and orientation probabilities follow the Boltzmann statistics, and relaxation rates depend on activation energy barriers. Consequently, it presents a unified mathematical framework that successfully merges kinetic barriers with thermodynamic landscapes to describe molecular dynamics observed under electric field in hybrid organic-inorganic materials.
