sophiecarenco

October 3, 2025: Best oral presentation award: Congrats to Kaltoum!

Kaltoum presented her work about low-temperature nickel phosphide at the Meeting on Nanosciences Advances, organized by the C'Nano network. She received the Best Oral Presentation award. Congrats!

July 9, 2025: Invited conference at SPSSM meeting

Very glad to meet and discuss with the international community on solid-state chemistry, in particular related to mixed-anion compounds and their properties. I presented our journey about lanthanide oxysulfide nanoparticles and received highly valuable feedback. Cheers to the organizers!

Article: Nickel phosphides as low temperature hydrogenation catalysts

In the framework of NanoFLPs, we develop here a new synthesis for nickel phosphide nanoparticles, assisted by H₂. We show that these are active catalysts, when paired with tributylphosphine, down to 0°C. Read the article.

With: Kaltoum, Sophie

Article out: a nice mechanistic study about the formation of Cu nanoparticles

This work, with contributions for computational and experimental chemistry, provides an interesting insight on the reduction path that leads to the nucleation of colloidal copper nanoparticles. Read the article.

With: Alexy, Sophie

Contributed article about Cobalt-manganese catalysts

Some existing work take time to mature! this is the case of this study about cobalt-manganese catalysts for the Fisher-Tropsch reaction, to which I contributed a while ago and is now complete and published in Nature Communication.

If you like studies dealing with a bunch of in situ and operando spectroscopies, this will be to your taste !

Read the article.

With: Sophie

Perspective Article about NanoFLPs

Published in the historical journal of the French Academy of Sciences, this article discusses the current standing of colloidal nanoparticles in the context of NanoFLPs. Catalysis by the colloidal suspension of nanoparticles has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this context, we explored the formation of NanoFLPs for the hydrogenation of alkynes such as phenylacetylene. However, to this date, no direct proof for the occurrence of an FLP has been provided on the examples that we developed. We discuss possible interpretations of the experimental data and ways of clarifying the mechanism involved. Read the article.

With: Sophie

January 2, 2025: Moving to CINaM

A new scientific adventure starts this year!

I am joining CINaM, an interdisciplinary research center of CNRS that 100% dedicated to nanosciences. The Center is located in Marseille on the Luminy campus.

More info to come in the next weeks!

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Refining the NanoFLP Concept

Still fighting to unveil an authentic NanoFLP, we uncovered an interesting low-temperature behavior of Ni nanoparticles in the presence of well-selected phosphine. This could be interpreted as the formation of a surface frustrated Lewis pair for H-H cleavage... but also as a consequence of phenylacetylene activation. What do you make of this?

Carbon is our friend!

Nickel fame for catalysis now extends to a new guy: nickel carbide. In this work, we show that this phase can be used as a catalyst for the hydrgenation of a number of moieties, coming along a greater robustness than the metallic counter-part. Check out our nickel carbide buddy.

Make them safer

It's a small step for the world of nanoparticles, but a big step for our beloved oxysulfides nanoplates: in this work, we propose to evaluate, in a very preliminary approach, some of the interactions of the nanoparticles with macrophage cells. We turned on the lamp (visible light) and monitored the impact in the production of radicals. Read for yourself.

Did you say NanoFLP?

We have been proposing for a while to use metal nanoparticles as partners in Frustrated Lewis Pairs. Now, we found that nickel-cobalt nanoparticles associated to well-chosen phosphines likely form such a pair, based on the correlation between Si-H bond activation and the Tolman cone angle of the phosphine: only a tiny range of steric hindrance is suitable, and it is related to the silane bulkiness. We believe we nailed it. Make your own opinion.

Molybdenum mapped out

Molybdenum is a key element of the energy transition. X-ray absortion spectroscopy at the L-edge is an amazing way to analyze it in solids, liquids, composites, etc. Here, we wrote some simple guidelines to interpret the data and we provided a consistent series of spectra for well-known, and less-know, Mo compounds. Read our map.

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