2009 Hans and Marlies Zimmer International Scholar

Manabu Abe was born in Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, in 1966. He received his Ph.D. from the Kyoto Institute of Technology (Professor Akira Oku), studying the oxidative ring-opening reaction of cyclopropanone acetals and its application to organic synthesis. In 1995, he found an academic position at Osaka University (Prof. Masatomo Nojima's group). In 2007, he moved to Hiroshima and became a Full Professor in Organic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Hiroshima University. From 1997-1998, he was an Alexander-von-Humboldt (AvH) fellow with Professor Waldemar Adam at the Universitat Weurzburg. His research focuses on Reactive Intermediates Chemistry, especially on singlet as well as triplet diradicals.

Generation of Long-lived Singlet 1,3-biradicals, and Their Related Chemistry

Singlet biradicals are key intermediates in processes involving homolytic bond-cleavages and bond formations. In general, the reactive intermediates are quite short-lived, and thus, largely elusive. To understand experimentally the reactivity, it is dispensable to pull down the singlet state below the triplet state and elongate the lifetime of singlet states. This presentation describes that (1) substituent and atom effects on the ground state spin-multiplicity of cyclopentane-1,3-diyls, (2) generation of long-lived singlet 2,2-dialkoxycyclopentane-1,3-diyls, and (3) the intermolecular reactivity of the singlet biradicals.