Electronic circular dichroism provides useful information on the electronic excited states of macromolecules. However, full interpretation and assignment of the observed transitions requires a detailed understanding of the electronic excited states of these macromolecules, which is a challenge to contemporary computational chemistry. In this talk, I will describe these calculations and their application to helical peptides, helical oligoureas and helical nanotubes constructed from amino acid derivatives of naphthalene diimide, through hydrogen bonding.

This talk will address the interface between inorganic and organic materials at nanostructured surfaces. Two complementary methods to generate surface features on the sub-10 nm scale will be considered: (i) room temperature manipulation of individual organic molecules with the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and (ii) the deposition of size-selected atomic clusters (nanoparticle beams) on surfaces.

Many light-induced processes in organic molecules, such as energy relaxation, energy/charge transfer and conformational changes, occur on ultrafast timescales, ranging from 10-14 to 10-13 s. The speed of such elementary processes is intimately linked to their efficiency, making ultrafast optical spectroscopy an invaluable tool for their investigation. Pump-probe spectroscopy requires both short pulses, in order to observe fast dynamics, and broad frequency tunability, to excite a system on resonance and probe optical transitions occurring at different frequencies.

Four seemingly simple transformations related to the chemistry of methane will be addressed from mechanistic and conceptual points of view, i.e.: 1) metal-mediated dehydrogenation to form metal-carbene complexes, 2) the hydrogen-atom abstraction step in the oxidative dimerization of methane, 3) the mechanisms of the CH4 -> CH3OH conversion, and 4) the initial bond scission as well as the rate-limiting step in the selective CH3OH -> CH2O oxidation.