Recent Advances in Free Radicals, Radical Ions and Radical Pairs
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2023) | Viewed by 18222
Special Issue Editors
Interests: photochemistry; photophysics; NMR; CIDNP; hyperpolarization; coherency; spin chemistry; free radicals; parahydrogen
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
It has long been known that the presence of an unpaired electron imparts very special properties to a molecule that with proper understanding can be used to great advantage. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences was conceived to provide a first-hand timely overview of the advances in using and understanding the spin and charge in molecular systems and new trends in this field that have emerged over the last two decades. Synthetic approaches have been developed that allow using the once delicate and fragile radicals as conventional off-the-shelf synthons that can go intact through multistep chemical transformations. Highly “persistent” radicals that can survive at elevated temperatures or in highly reductive native biofluids are now available and can be used as advanced spin probes, while even conventional spin probes and labels enjoy wider and wider application in the study of advanced materials. Certain stable closely-coupled multispin organic systems with sizeable ferromagnetic exchange have at last been obtained that push quantitative quantum chemistry to the edge, driving further refinement in the accuracy and predictive power of calculations. At the other extreme of stability are the elusive radicals and radical ions that are the acting agents in certain biological damage and repair processes, mediating a wide class of chemical reactions, or determining the ultimate fate of irradiated materials by channeling the deposited energy down either safe or damaging reaction paths. Certain unusual “degenerate” reactions with nominally no changes to reagents then become possible. The creation of radicals in pairs, as is often the case, opens a whole new world of quantum coherence and entanglement phenomena in spin-correlated radical pairs, with curious reaction patterns and non-thermal distribution of reaction products. Radical ion pairs in donor-acceptor systems open the way for hitherto impossible recombination exciplexes with highly tunable optical emission properties. A recent and crucially important realization is the possibility of converting “electron spin polarization” from radical pairs into polarization of nuclear spins in target molecules, boosting the potential sensitivity of NMR and MRI techniques by orders of magnitude. A further dimension to the picture is added by the sensitivity of processes involving pairs of electron spins to applied magnetic fields, opening the possibility of external control, or more modestly, of probing the reaction and the reactants. These are only some of the topics that we invite you to address in your tentative contributions to this Special Issue, and we are certainly open to further suggestions on recent advances in spin-related chemistry, biology, and material science.
Dr. Alexandra V. Yurkovskaya
Dr. Dmitri V. Stass
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- persistent radicals
- spin probes for material science
- coupled organic multispin systems
- quantum chemistry of free radicals
- biologically relevant radicals and radical ions
- matrix-stabilized radicals and radical ions
- radical-controlled energy channeling
- spin-correlated radical pairs and beyond
- radical-derived nuclear spin hyperpolarization
- magnetic field sensitivity of radical pairs
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