Dr. Timothy Keiderling is supported by a grant from The Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his research in the application of vibrational optical activity (VOA) to the determination of chemical structures of molecules with chiral centers. This research has important potential applications as a structural tool for biologically important polypeptides. Dr. Keiderling will continue his pioneering work in this active field of research with an emphasis on using vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) studies of small theoretically tractable molecules with a goal of correlating spectra and structure. Intense effort will also be made to generalize previous work on magnetic vibrational circular dichroism (MVCD) to further clarify the role of vibronic coupling in VCD. Finally, instrumental improvements in the area of Raman circular intensity differential (RCID) spectroscopy will enable systematic empirical studies of several small molecule systems for which VCD data have previously been obtained.
