DESY physicist Vincent Wanie. (Photo: Maurizio Contran)
With his ERC Starting Grant, DESY physicist Vincent Wanie wants to develop a new experimental setup based on a special laser system to investigate the interactions between chiral molecules. This is made possible by state-of-the-art ultra-fast light sources combined with experimental methods that are particularly sensitive to the structure of molecules. The setup has a great importance as its functionality is relevant in chemistry, pharmacy, and materials research.
Vincent Wanie has been awarded 2.5 million Euro through an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Among other things, the grant will be used to fund two postdoctoral positions and one doctoral position. The ERC is Europe's leading funding organization for excellent pioneering research. With its Starting Grants, the ERC supports outstanding young researchers on their way to an independent scientific career. Funding from the ERC is one of the most prestigious awards in Europe.
In the supported project KEBAB (Key Exploration of intermolecular Bonding in chiral recognition using Advanced laser light Beams), Wanie and his team plan to develop a completely new experiment setup based on a modern table-top laser over a period of five years starting in 2026. This will enable investigations into how a chiral molecule distinguishes the chirality of other molecules in order to form a bond with a matching one. “Chiral molecules are like left and right hands,” says Wanie, who works in the Attosecond Science Group at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL). “They consist of the same atoms, but are mirror images of each other, so they don't fit into the same glove.” Many biological processes are based on handshakes between matching chiral molecules. “How well one molecule fits with another determines whether a drug heals or harms, or whether a biological process succeeds or fails.”
Over the past 10 years, significant progress has been made in time-resolved measurements of chirality in ultrafast time scales, but only isolated single molecules have been investigated. Wanie wants to answer the following questions: What mechanisms do chiral molecules use to recognize each other? How does a chiral molecule transfer chirality to a non-chiral molecule – in other words, change its structure so that it fits? And can this so-called enantioselectivity of molecular interactions be influenced so that molecules with a particular structure are formed preferentially? “To find out, we need to study molecules in the gas phase, without contribution from external factors such as a solvent, in which they are usually dissolved", says Wanie. Laser imaging enables this and also offers the necessary temporal resolution to track these processes, which take place within picoseconds or even femtoseconds (trillionths or quadrillionths of a second). “With lasers, we can observe chemistry in action and follow all of the previously unseen steps that lead to reaction products.”
Wanie's approach was recognised as original, technically sophisticated, and extremely ambitious, but at the same time carefully designed and feasible. Above all, KEBAB has the potential to advance laser technology and the understanding of intermolecular chiral dynamics significantly. “We congratulate Vincent Wanie on this significant funding,” says Britta Redlich, Director of Photon Science at DESY. “On the one hand, the project will accelerate technological developments in the field of photonics, which in turn should provide important fundamental insights into molecular chirality that can influence the production of medications.” These results can also be essential for the catalysis of various chemical products, as well as optoelectronics and special polymers and liquid crystals used in sensor technology and electronic displays, for example. Wanie's project is being developed in close synergy with the future experimental capabilities of the research facilities at DESY and will provide valuable insights for this purpose.
