On the twist: Chirality at surfaces

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• Stephen Driver, Surface Science Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 27 January 2011, 16:00-17:00
• Mott Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Stephen Walley.

In living organisms, chirality – the property of an object that it cannot be superposed on its mirror image – is fundamental. Key biochemical building blocks, such as amino acids and sugars, are chiral, and occur in one enantiomeric form; getting the chirality right is also crucial in pharmaceutical manufacture. A vision of utilising metal surfaces as heterogeneous catalysts for asymmetric synthesis, or in enantiomer-discriminating biosensors, underpins the current drive to understand how they interact with chiral adsorbates. In this talk, I will discuss different manifestations of chirality at surfaces, using amino acids adsorbed on Cu surfaces as an archetype. I will focus in particular on the subtle interplay between molecular, footprint, and self-organisational chiralities, and how we can tip the playing field by using intrinsically chiral surfaces.

This talk is part of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Featured lists
• ME Seminar
• Mott Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group
• School of Physical Sciences
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks

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