CHEM In the literature: contested

Reproducibility and artifacts in reported cavity rate changes

In plain words

Several labs that repeated reported cavity experiments saw no change in reaction rate, and others found that small flaws, such as mirrors that are not perfectly parallel or slight heating, can mimic one. The question is which published effects survive careful controls.

Precise statement

For the published VSC rate-change claims (for example silane deprotection and ester hydrolysis reactions), determine which reproduce within error when cavity-length non-uniformity, local heating, radiative energy transfer, mirror-surface chemistry and spectroscopic readout artifacts in the strongly coupled spectrum are controlled. An answer is a classification of the reported effects into reproduced, artifact-explained, or unresolved, with the artifact quantified for each.

What would settle it

Independent replications with shared protocols and samples, reporting rate constants with uncertainties for both resonant and detuned cavities.

Status in the literature

Unverified note

Imperatore, Asbury and Giebink (J. Chem. Phys., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0046307) did not reproduce one reported rate change, and Michon et al. (JACS, 2024) showed that cavity-length non-uniformity can distort rate extraction.