RESEARCH

Pharmacy and Physical Chemistry

Pharmacy is, in a broad sense, the interaction between chemicals and biomoleules in living organisms. If the result of the interaction is helpful, the chemical is a drug, and if it has a negative aspect, it is a side effect and a poison. Therefore, it may be said that all research fields including "chemical substances-living organisms" interaction can be called pharmacy.

Among them, our research is positioned as basic research focusing on the molecular properties of chemical substances, and we aim to understand various phenomena mainly at the molecular level. The method is not limited, but the experimental approach uses laser spectroscopy, photochemical reaction, infrared spectroscopy, MALDI, mass spectrometry, etc. The theoretical approach uses computational chemistry or molecular dynamics calculation.

Based on physical chemistry, we are working on topics of interest in any related field.

Femtosecond laser ionization of organic molecules and their complexes

Most drugs belong to organic compounds. When a femtosecond laser pulse is applied to organic molecules or molecular complex, electrons in the molecular system gain high energy in a very short time, resulting in multiple ionization, chemical bond breaking, or molecular rearrangement. Our group is working to discover new reactions induced by femtosecond (10^-15 s) lasers and to understand their mechanisms. In particular, we focus on the behavior of dications, in which high mobility of intramolecular rearrangement result in the unexpected reaction pathway. The formation of dication is also applied to descriminate structural isomers