February 10, 2010

Speaker: Professor Nathan Hammer

Title: Spectroscopically Tracking the Evolution of Noncovalent Interactions from the Single Molecule Level to the Condensed Phases

Abstract:  Noncovalent interactions play important roles in all areas of chemistry and physics.  Water, for example, represents the archetypal example of noncovalent interactions dominating the physical properties of an important molecular species.  Many researchers have studied the effects of noncovalent interactions under a myriad of different experimental conditions and, in fact, the topic of "hydrogen bonding" returns nearly 40,000 hits (for 1981-2009) on the Web of Science search engine.  Our group's research goal is to elucidate how the effects of weak noncolvalent interactions evolve with system size and we aim to show how single molecule interactions can be connected to bulk manifestations.