Introduction to Coherence Spectroscopy and its Application to the Study of Surface-Confined Chirality

Wolfgang Jäger 院士

加拿大阿尔伯塔大学

时间：2025年5月16日（星期五）16:30

地点：思明校区卢嘉锡楼202报告厅

　　　翔安校区能源材料大楼3号楼会议室5、6（转播）

　　　漳州校区生化主楼307教室（转播）　　　

厦门大学谱学分析与仪器教育部重点实验室

2025年5月12日

报告人简介：

Wolfgang Jäger received his PhD degree in Chemistry from the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, in 1989. He joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, in 1995 after spending time as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and to the rank of Full Professor in 2003.

Professor Jäger’s research includes fundamental studies of intermolecular interactions using spectroscopic investigations of weakly bound complexes and clusters, development of atmospheric trace gas sensing techniques that utilize solid state infrared diode lasers, and photoreaction chamber studies of aerosol formation.

For his scientific achievements, Professor Jäger was awarded the NSERC Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2002, in 2004 he became a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Cluster Science which was renewed in 2011, and in 2008 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 2009 to 2010, he spent a sabbatical year at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany, which was funded by a Humboldt Fellowship.

报告摘要：

In the first part of this presentation, I will give an introduction into the dynamics of spectroscopic transitions and coherence spectroscopy that is suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students. We will abandon the first-year chemistry view of a spectroscopic transition in terms of a jump between two energy levels and will introduce the idea of a superposition state. A set of equations that governs the interaction of light and matter in a spectroscopic transition, the Bloch equations, will be derived in a simplified fashion. The Bloch equations will then be used to gain qualitative insights into the behavior of atoms and molecules in the presence and absence of electromagnetic radiation.

In the second part, I will describe our work on molecular-level surface induced chirality using rotational coherence spectroscopy and electronic structure calculations. We studied the interaction of n-hexane, a prochiral molecule, with furfural, a planar molecule that serves as a molecular level surface, that can lead to mirror-symmetry breaking in hexane. A number of n-hexane – furfural conformers were identified in the electronic structure calculations, and six were detected experimentally. Interconversion pathways were mapped out theoretically and induced experimentally using different molecular expansion conditions. It was possible to promote enantiomeric enrichment and induce near homochirality at one of the furfural surfaces.