Wednesday, 1 June 2022: 08:00
West Meeting Room 203 (Vancouver Convention Center)
One hundred years ago, the "century of cinema" began, with images far superior to still images. However, even in the 21st century, molecular formulae and still images still play a leading role in the world of chemistry. In 2007, I reported an electron microscopic image of a process in which a hydrocarbon molecule undergoes a conformational change in a carbon nanotube (Science, 316, 853 (2007)), and this was the first movie capturing the motions of a molecule with a single-molecule atomic-resolution real-time electron microscopic (SMART-EM) technique. This marked the beginning of the era of "Cinematic Chemistry", where we can see with our eyes how chemistry takes place at an atomistic level (Acc. Chem. Res., 50, 1281-1292 (2017). In this lecture, I will report on the new paradigms of "cinematic chemistry", where carbon nanotube plays an essential role as a substrate on or in which the chemistry takes place. Examples will include single-molecule thermodynamics and kinetics based on ultra-fast imaging of individual molecules and reaction events, in situ structural and statistical analysis of crystal growth (JACS, 143, 1763-1767 (2021).
