Unusual approaches for symmetry breaking in chemical systems

NaMeS students are invited to IPC PAS Seminar within CREATE Lectures delivered by:

Prof. Alexander Kuhn

Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie, de Biologie et de Physique,

University Bordeaux, France

Wednesday, 13th November, 2019, 10.00

Assembly hall of the IPC PAS

Abstract

Asymmetry is a very common feature of many systems, objects and molecules that we encounter and use in our daily life. Actually, it is in a majority of cases the absolutely crucial ingredient for conferring a certain useful property to a system, a prominent example being the chiral nature of pharmaceutically active compounds. Chemists have developed various approaches to generate asymmetry, from the molecular to the macroscopic scale, but are still facing major challenges when exploring efficient alternative physico-chemical concepts for symmetry breaking. Therefore, there is a strong need to explore, understand and optimize alternative approaches, which might lead in the long run to completely different but practically viable processes with economic potential. We we’ll discuss in this presentation two quite unconventional concepts, allowing to break the symmetry in chemical systems at different scales, ranging from the molecular level to the macroscopic world. The utility of these concepts will be illustrated with a selection of very recent results concerning the detection, separation and synthesis of chiral molecules, as well as the elaboration and characterization of asymmetric, so-called Janus objects and systems with complex composition, behavior or functionality, based on the use of bipolar electrochemistry as a leading strategy.