Berlin 2014 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 3: Chiral Systems (SYCS 2)

MO 3.2: Talk

Monday, March 17, 2014, 14:30–14:45, BEBEL HS213

Enantiomer Identification of Mixtures of Chiral Molecules with Broadband Microwave Spectroscopy — •V. Alvin Shubert¹, David Schmitz¹, David Patterson², John M. Doyle², and Melanie Schnell^1,3 — ¹Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Hamburg, Germany — ²Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA — ³The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

The phenomenon that biochemical molecules are built almost exclusively from left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars is known as the "homochirality of life". In nature and as products of chemical syntheses, chiral molecules often exist in mixtures that must be analyzed to identify the molecular components and measure the enantiomeric excesses (ee). We present a new method of differentiating enantiomeric pairs of chiral molecules in the gas phase.[1,2] It is based on broadband rotational spectroscopy and is a sum or difference frequency generation three-wave mixing process. The signal phase differs by pi radians between members of an enantiomeric pair and signal amplitude is proportional to the ee. This technique can also be applied to mixtures of chiral molecules and we present results on the analysis of mixtures of carvone, menthone, and carvomenthenol.

[1] D. Patterson, M. Schnell, J. M. Doyle, Nature 2013, 497, 475-477.

[2] V. A. Shubert, D. Schmitz, D. Patterson, J. M. Doyle, M. Schnell, Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2013, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201306271