[Academic] FW: Seminar

[Neil Hunt]

Dear All,

Please see attached details of a Physics and Life Sciences seminar tomorrow
that may be of interest, I'd be grateful if you would circulate to your
groups.

Best wishes,
Neil


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JA3.17 3pm Tuesday 11th Dec

Ultrafast Spectroscopy of Hydrogen Bonds: from Complexing Acid-Base Pairs to
Nucleobase Pairing

Erik T. J. Nibbering
Max Born Institut fuer Nichtlineare Optik und Kurzzeitspektroskopie, Berlin,
Germany

Hydrogen bonding, playing a key role in the structure and properties of a
broad range of molecular liquids and biomolecular motifs, has been studied
by structure-resolving diffraction techniques and  nuclear magnetic
resonance spectroscopy. Vibrational spectroscopy has been a widely used
method as it provides direct access to probing the ultrafast dynamics of
hydrogen bonds. Recent advances in ultrafast infrared spectroscopy has shed
new light on the structural dynamics of protic liquids such as water, of
acid-base complexes as well as of hydrogen-bonded nucleobase pairs in DNA.
>From these ultrafast infrared experiments it follows that the direct
correlation between IR-active vibrational marker modes frequency shifts and
hydrogen bond structure, that has been widely used since the 1950s, has to
be refined. Anharmonic couplings derived from these ultrafast IR experiments
reveal new detail on the vibrational potentials. Future directions in
ultrafast probing of hydrogen bond dynamics will be discussed.