Guest: Prof. Zahra Jamshidi, Associate Professor, Sharif University of Technology, Iran
Vibrational optical activity (VOA) consisting of vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) and Raman optical activity (ROA) are powerful tools for the determination of the absolute configuration of chiral molecules. These techniques have widespread attention in biology and especially pharmaceutical industry, which boosted the development of experimental and theoretical methods. The intrinsically weak intensity of VOA phenomena, which is several orders of magnitude smaller than IR and Raman, is one of the major experimental challenges. In this regard, we propose to employ plasmonic excitations with energies in the UV-Vis to near-infrared range that can provide low-lying excitations which can couple with the vibrational transitions and induce enhanced VCD intensity. In the first part, in collaboration with Prof. dr. L. Visscher we plan to improve the currently available formalism to calculate the effect of (plasmonic) low-lying electronic states on VCD absorption. In the second part, in collaboration with Prof. Buma, the resulting theoretical method will be validated by comparing the predicted spectra with the experimentally obtained spectra.