It’s All About Water (Prof. P. Hamm)
- Datum: 26.01.2016
- Uhrzeit: 14:30 - 16:00
- Vortragende(r): Prof. Dr. Peter Hamm, University of Zürich, Schweiz
- Raum: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
- Gastgeber: MPQ
Ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy, and in particular its extension to multidimensional techniques, can tell us a lot about solvation dynamics, structural dynamics and energy transfer processes of solution phase molecular systems.
I will illustrate applications of these spectroscopies by discussing a
couple of quite diverse examples that lie at the interface between
Physics, Biology and Chemistry. In different ways, these examples
highlight the importance of water as a very special substance. That is, I
will start out with the ultrafast structural dynamics of bulk water and
concentrated salt solution observed by THz photon echoes (Physics),
continue with the catalytic cycle of an artificial photosynthetic system
designed for light-driven water splitting (Chemistry), and finally
discuss the response of an allosteric protein upon an external
perturbation (Biology). Also the latter is in fact dictated by the
dynamics of the water solvation layer.