David Y. Curtin
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry
Professor David Y. Curtin received his A.B. degree from Swarthmore College in 1943 and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois in 1945. His research interests are centered in the area of chemistry of the organic solid state.
Research
Our reserach (carried out in collaboration with Professor Paul) is devoted to an investigation of organic chemistry of the solid state and combines synthetic techniques with kinetic, spectroscopic and other studies including X-ray structure determination. Emphasis is on the use of structural information to gain an understanding of reactions of organic compounds in the solid state and reactions of crystalline solids with gases.
We are interested in both homogeneous and heterogeneous thermal rearrangements of single crystals. Studies of heterogeneous rearrangements have as a primary goal learning how to control the nucleation process.
We are interested in crystal symmetry and its possible chemical applications. Thermal reactions which occur with a change in crystal symmetry-centrosymmetric to chiral or centrosymmetric to polar-are of particular interest.
We have been concerned with the preference shown by a chiral gas for reaction with one chiral crystal over its enantiomer.
We are also exploring the chemical implications of the polar axis in solid state organic chemistry. Our discovery of a simple method of determination of the absolute direction of the polar axis of an oriented single crystal using the pyroelectric effect is being applied to a variety of crystalline substances. We are interested in combining this technique with the computation of the direction of the electric dipole of a single crystal from the crystal structure to assign absolute configurations to chiral molecules.
Publications
Patil. A. A., Curtin, D.Y., and Paul, I.C., "Use of the Pyroelectric Effect to Determine the Absolute Orientation of the Polar Axis in Molecular Crystals," J. Am. Chem. Soc. 107, 726 (1985).
Patil, A.O., Curtin, D. Y., and Paul, I.C., "Interconversion by Hydrogen Transfer of Unsymmetrically Substituted Quinhydrones in the Solid State.," J. Am. Chem. Soc. 106, 4010 (1984).
