Prof Nikita Matsunaga is an Associate Professor in Computational and Physical Chemistry
at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.
I had the pleasure of working on one of his projects in the summer of 2001.
My work with him unfortunately ended after I moved back to Sweden after 9/11,
and now looking back at the opportunity I was given, being right in the middle of
adventure, my heart starts beating faster when I read the stuff his doing.
Check this out:
Nikita Matsunagas Webpage
(proudly find my name on his page Students -post students... =)
Role
of surface crossing
In the undergraduate program, you
are taught that a chemical reaction is a
process that transforms
reactants to products via a transition state.
For simple
reactions, this is a good picture.
Life is a lot more complicated
than man! How does an excited state decay?
How does the spin of an
electron get flipped during reaction to get diradicals?
These are
the questions we can not answer from the conventional single potential
energy
surface picture.
Photochemistry has full of these
examples. One of such reactions we are interested in
is called
spin-forbidden reaction.
The reaction starts out having all
electrons paired (singlet state).
During the reaction, one of the
electrons flips
its spin to become a diradical state (triplet state). We need to
consider both the singlet and triplet potential energy surfaces. The
most important feature common to both potentials is the lowest energy
crossing point between the two states.
By
investigating the
minimum energy crossing point, we can learn about what geometry of the
molecule the spin is likely to flip as well as probability of the event
can be calculated.
Part of Medicinareberget, Gothenburg.
Unfortunately could not put Nikita's picture of S-T crossing in.
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