Investigating Absolute Stereochemical Configuration with Coulomb Explosion Imaging
Martin Pitzer,
Robert Berger,
Jürgen Stohner,
Reinhard Dörner,
Markus Schöffler
Affiliations
Martin Pitzer
Institut für Kernphysik, Goethe-Universität Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, 60438 Frankfurt, Germany; Department of Chemical and Biological Physics Weizmann Institute of Science P.O. Box 26, 76100 Rehovot, Israel. [email protected]
It is a particularly challenging task in stereochemistry to determine the absolute configuration of chiral molecules, i.e. to assign to a given sample the microscopic enantiomeric structure. In recent years, Coulomb Explosion Imaging (CEI) has been shown to yield directly the absolute configuration of small molecules in the gas phase. This contribution describes the experimental basics of this approach, highlights the most significant results and discusses limitations. A short discussion on extending Coulomb Explosion Imaging beyond analytic aspects to fundamental questions of molecular chirality concludes this review.
