New Method For Studying Molecule Reactions a Breakthrough İn Organic Chemistry

Good chemists are passive-aggressive — they manipulate molecules without actually touching them. In a feat of manipulating substances at the nanoscale, UCLA researchers and colleagues demonstrated a method for isolating two molecules together on a substrate and controlling how those two molecules react when excited with ultraviolet light, making detailed observations both before and after the reaction.

Their research is published today in the journal Science.

"This is one step in measuring and understanding the interactions between light and molecules, which we hope will eventually lead to more efficient conversion of sunlight to electrical and other usable forms of energy," said lead study author Paul S. Weiss, a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences. "Here, we used the energy from the light to induce a chemical reaction in a way that would not happen for molecules free to move in solution; they were held in place by their attachment to a surface and by the unreactive matrix of molecules around them."

Weiss is also director of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Controlling exactly how molecules combine in order to study the resulting reactions is called regioselectivity. It is important because there are a variety of ways that molecules can combine, with varying chemical products. One way to direct a reaction is to isolate molecules and to hold them together to get regioselective reactions; this is the strategy used by enzymes in many biochemical reactions.

"The specialized scanning tunneling microscope used for these studies can also measure the absorption of light and charge separation in molecules designed for solar cells," Weiss said. "This gives us a new way to optimize these molecules, in collaboration with synthetic chemists. This is what first brought us together with our collaborators at the University of Washington, led by Prof. Alex Jen."