Chemical reaction study
Professor Ihee and his research group is mainly involved in the structural dynamics of chemical and biological reactions. Especially, visualizing solution-phase reaction dynamics is a distinguished field of his research group.
His group has been succeed to reveal the structural dynamics of a variety of reactions in solution by time-resolved X-ray solution scattering (TRXL) technique. In this technique, a laser pulse initiates the reaction of solution-phase sample, and the reaction is probed by an ultrashort X-ray pulse. By analyzing the scattering signal of the X-ray pulse, structure of a reacting molecule can be retrieved.
TRXL can be applied to variety of molecules including functional biomolecules such as proteins, and some important organic and inorganic small molecules. Hemoglobin, which plays an important role in vertebrates, is an example of the biomolecules.
The reaction mechanism of small organic molecules can be also studied using TRXL. For example, C2H4I2 has two possible photodissociation pathways, which are represented by the bridging and non-bridging intermediates. TRXL study of C2H4I2 revealed that the bridging pathway is the more plausible among the two pathways.