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Foreword by the Guest Editors: Molecular Reaction Dynamics

2007; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ijch.5680470101

1869-5868

Richard N. Zare, Israël Schechter,

Molecular spectroscopy and chirality

Few people have initiated as much progress in new areas of chemical dynamics as Raphael David Levine, and few have been as intimately concerned with both theory and experiment. His leadership role is evident not only in the new issues that he raised for public discussion, in the fresh problems that he addressed, and as a teacher and spokesman, but also in his influence outside of chemical physics and even of chemistry. This all happened while building up a novel area of chemistry that was made possible by the development of molecular beams and of laser chemistry and spectroscopy. This being the case, we made a special effort to obtain relevant details about his life story and bring them to light. From a cousin, also named Raphael, we learned some of their family history. Of great-great-grandfather Raphael David Levine little is known, but his son had a large library, some books of which are in Israel today and clearly stamped “ex libris Samuel Benjamin”. In the next generation was another Raphael David Levine, who was a Hebrew teacher, as well as a teacher in a gymnasium, in Russia. He died at a young age in 1911, but his wife Tova fulfilled his dying wish by bringing their three young children to Palestine. And so their oldest child, Chaim Levine, began attending the gymnasium in Tel Aviv in 1912. His grandfather on his mother's side, Yehuda Greenberg, who had been a dentist in the court of the Czar, fled St. Petersburg when the Russian Revolution broke out. His family went directly to Tel Aviv, and their daughter Sonia was also admitted to the gymnasium there. Later Chaim studied for his Ph.D. in London in civil engineering, while Sonia was also there as an undergraduate in journalism. They married, and our subject, Raphael David Levine, was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His two younger brothers also carry on the academic tradition of the family. The only break with tradition is that the present Raphael David is known to all by the nickname “Raphy”. But then, his home in Jerusalem is on a street whose name translates as “every generation and its traditions.” Oscar K. Rice's 70th birthday. MK is Martin Karplus, JCP is John C. Polanyi; behind them is D.J. LeRoy. Hal is Harold Johnston; below him is Raphy. Rudy is Rudolph A. Marcus, Ben is Ben Widom; above Ben is H. C. Ramsperger. Seymour is B. Seymour Rabinovitch, GBK is George B. Kistiakowsky. At extreme right is H.O. Pritchard. School of Advanced Studies, Mt. Scopus, 1979 RDL is Raphael D. Levine, RBB is Richard B. Bernstein, JJ is Joshua Jortner. At the Fritz Haber Research Center, Hebrew University, circa 1990. Back row, L to R: Lorenz Cederbaum, Raphy, Christopher Schlier, and Jorn Manz. Front row, L to R: Rob Bisseling, (Unidentified), Avinoam Ben Shaul, and Ronnie Kosloff. Circa 1991. Standing right is: Raphy, sitting in front of him is Mira Hermoni-Levine. At Liège University, 1993. L to R: Raphy, Francoise Remacle, and Jean-Claude Lorquet. Wolf Prize to Ahmed Zewail, 1993. Party at Egyptian ambassador's house. L to R: Mrs. Joshua Jortner, Raphy, Leo Sachs, Ahmed Zewail, Mrs. Leo Sachs, Mira Hermoni-Levine, and Joshua Jortner. Award to Karl L. Kompa of Honorary Doctorate, Technion, 1995. L to R: Raphy, Mira Hermoni-Levine, Karl Kompa, Christl Kompa, Dina Farin-Schechter, and Israel Schechter. Dinner at the US National Academy of Sciences, 1999. L to R: Raphy and Margaret Kivelson (both were inducted that year) and R. Steve Berry. James Kinsey and Raphy. Joshua Jortner's 70th birthday celebration, 2003. L to R: Raphy, Edward W. Schlag, and Jortner. Dinner at the Levine's home, March 2007, on the occasion of the Einstein lecture by Yuan T. Lee. Hebrew University Nobel Prize laureate Robert Auman is in the armchair at the back, left, and Raphy is standing (left). Raphy started school in Haifa. In 1946 his father moved to Tel Aviv to become chief engineer of the department of public works. It was not until almost the end of high school that Raphy became a star pupil. Then, as befitting his sudden rise, he started smoking a pipe. He did not quit for fifty years. Raphy graduated with the top prize in Mathematics and Physics. Since he was still too young for army service, he went directly to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and under the influence of his high school chemistry teacher, Arieh Lahav, became a chemistry major. In the first and second years he took mostly classes in Physics and Mathematics. He failed organic chemistry, and the claim is that this is because he wrote down a sevenfold coordinated carbon in some mechanism of an attack on a ketone. He was clearly wrong but he was also ahead of his time because it is nowadays accepted that carbon does become hypervalent during that transformation. He also barely passed the practical lab in analytical chemistry. In physical chemistry the senior teaching assistant, Gideon Czapsky, spent extra time looking for problems with which to fail him during the weekly oral exam. The story of the problem about negative activation energy used to be one of the folk tales of the department. For his senior thesis, 1958–1959, Raphy chose to work with Gabriel Stein. This proved a wise choice. He worked (experimentally!) on the photodetachment of the iodide negative ion in dilute aqueous solutions. The UV light was from a mercury lamp, while the time resolution was determined by how fast Raphy could press a stopwatch. He measured the yield of charge transfer to solvent as a function of pH. The dependence on the concentration of H+ was to some fractional power whose value was between 0.45 to 0.55. Gabriel Stein called Raphy to his office and said, “I have a feeling that the power is exactly 0.5. You go home and do not come back to the department before you provide a theory of why 0.5.” Three weeks later, Raphy came back with the solution. He was able to translate the concentration of H+ to a timescale, thereby showing that a very fast-moving species recombines with the neutral iodine atom, and this quenches the charge transfer to solvent. This work eventually became Raphy's first paper and also sealed his reputation as a budding theorist. But at the time there was essentially no theoretical chemistry in Israel. Gabriel Stein wrote to the Friends of the Hebrew University in England. They provided a fellowship of £400 (a year!) and after doing his time as a Ranger in the armored corps (1960–1962) and reaching the rank of Master Sergeant, Raphy went to England for his Ph.D. Raphy is very fond of telling how he learned much of what he knows in the army and how, in the army, he wrote his most influential book, a book that is still classified. There is ample empirical evidence that legends about the pipe-smoking soldier survive to this very day. It is also clear that after two years riding armored half-tracks Raphy did not remember much of the quantum mechanics that he learned as an undergraduate from Giulio Racah. So it was very useful for Raphy that Gabriel Stein arranged that prior to going to England he would attend the Lowdin summer school in Uppsala. Raphy got his Ph.D. in 1964, with George Hall, writing on Theories of Chemical Reactions. He did his postdoc with Charles Coulson at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, 1964–1966. Coulson suggested that Raphy teach a class on Theories of Chemical Reactions and later suggested that Raphy make his lecture notes into a book that Coulson presented to Oxford University Press. The resulting monograph, Quantum Mechanics of Molecular Rate Processes (OUP 1969, Dover reprint, 1999) was cited by the committee for the award of the Israel Prize in 1974. Work on the photochemistry and radiation chemistry of aqueous solutions continued at the Hebrew University, so Raphy's M.Sc. thesis was well remembered and Gabriel Stein had considerable support to arrange that the University invite him back. Shortly thereafter, in 1968, at the age of 30, Raphy was promoted to full Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. This caused some comments because at the time there was only one full professor per subject. But in late 1968, responding to the student unrest in the US and, closer to home, in France, the governors of the Hebrew University changed from a Germanic-type to an American-type academic structure. Still, legend has it that Raphy remains the youngest full professor ever appointed at the Hebrew University. In 1981 Raphy established the Fritz Haber Research Center for Molecular Dynamics, the first MINERVA center at the Hebrew University. Together with Joshua Jortner of Tel Aviv University and Edward Schlag of Munich University he established the James Franck Binational German-Israeli Program in Laser-Matter Interaction, in 1989. On the 60th anniversary of the Hebrew University in 1985 he was appointed Max Born Professor of Natural Philosophy with support from the Volkswagen Foundation. In the 1988–89 academic year, Raphy held an appointment as Miller Research Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1989 to 1995 he was A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Since 1989 he has been Professor in Residence at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1992 he was appointed an external scientific member of the Max Planck Society. Raphy's original scientific quest, to understand what really happens when a chemical reaction takes place, has continued to guide the main thrust of his efforts. In the broadest terms, his theme has been “the role of energy in chemical reactions.” Notwithstanding his loyalty to this focus, Raphy's work has had an impact on many areas of science outside chemical physics. In nuclear physics, his ideas have found applications in the study of collisions of heavy ions. In fact, there are many other fields where questions of energy and chemical change are relevant, such as aeronautical engineering (designing space vehicles that can survive re-entry into the earth's atmosphere), mechanical and chemical engineering (shock waves and detonations), or the design of high-power lasers. His work on using maximum entropy in “inversion problems” has been used in applications as diverse as NASA's image resolution programs, advanced designs for human tomography, voice recognition, X-ray structure determination, radio astronomy, and even in economics. The work on algebraic methods influenced mathematicians to the extent that “Levine's problem” appears in titles and abstracts of papers on Lie groups. His large group of former graduate students has also carried his influence into many diverse areas. One new direction of his work is the study of chemistry under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. Although, at first thought, this would suggest application to problems in space physics, Raphy and his collaborators have shown that such conditions can occur when energetic clusters of atoms strike hard surfaces. The very high energy density accompanying the collisions can enable reactions to take place that are favored by thermodynamics but ordinarily occur at negligible rates. As an example, the reaction of nitrogen and oxygen (what can be called the “burning of air”) can be facilitated. Raphy's theoretical calculations have led to a number of experimental studies that already confirm some of his predictions. The breadth of Raphy's interests, their relation to experiments, and the collaborative nature of much of his research is typified by his work on the properties of quantum dots (which he calls “designer atoms”) and their interactions. This research arose from experimental studies carried out at UCLA by Jim Heath and his group and is part of the first research carried out under the auspices of the California NanoSciences Institute. Raphy has explored in detail the electronic structures of these nanomaterials and the ways in which they respond to external controls such as pressure and electrical field. His work helps give direction to the experiments and the ways in which quantum dots can be employed in electronic devices. Raphy has also continued to make contributions to solving fundamental problems. His recent research examines the role of the size of a system and its thermodynamic behavior, a method for simulating the behavior of highly correlated Fermionic systems, and the general problem of the limits of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for the coupling between electrons and nuclei. He is also carrying out research in the fundamentals of molecular computing by considering the possibility of using the photophysics of single molecules to construct logic gates. While this is unlikely to lead to desktop machines based on single-molecule logic, these fundamental studies help us to understand the ultimate limits of devices, and has attracted much attention in the chemical physics community. Everyone who has worked with Raphy has been impressed with the quickness of his mind and is facility in coming up with theories and writing them down. His friend Jim Kinsey, now Executive Director of the Welch Foundation, remarked that Raphy writes papers like some men make love. At the time of retirement Raphy had 638 papers published or accepted, five books as an author, and a number of others as an editor. Among his books are such seminal texts as R.D. Levine, Quantum Mechanics of Molecular Rate Processes (1969, 1999); R.D. Levine and R.B. Bernstein, Molecular Reaction Dynamics (1974, with Japanese and Chinese translations) and (same authors) Molecular Reaction Dynamics and Chemical Reactivity (1987, revised 1989, German translation by Ch. Schlier); A. Ben-Shaul, Y. Haas, K.L. Kompa, and R.D. Levine, Lasers and Chemical Change (1981); and F. Iachello and R.D. Levine, Algebraic Theory of Molecules (1995). The full list of Raphy's publications can be found at http://www.fh.huji.ac.il/members/Levine/publication.htm Raphy presents about a dozen seminars each year at major institutions and a similar number of invited presentations at meetings or named lectures at universities throughout the world. He is a member of the editorial boards of over a dozen scientific journals. Starting in 1964 with the award of a Ramsay Memorial Fellowship, Raphy has been recognized abroad, and he has equally been acclaimed in Israel. In addition to the Israel Prize in 1974, he was awarded the Weizmann Prize in 1979, the Wolf Prize in 1988, the Rothschild Prize in 1992, and the EMET Prize in 2002. Outside of Israel he most recently received the MOLEC award in 2004. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, Max Planck Society, the American Philosophical Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Danish Academy of Letters and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Liege and the Technical University of Munich. Raphy retired in 2007, 39 years after his appointment. He still drives the same car he bought when he joined the faculty of Hebrew University. Today, all of Israel's universities and research institutions have at least one of Raphy's former graduate students on their faculty. (The Weizmann Institute tops the list with four.) They are active in disciplines ranging from computer science to molecular biology. The retirement presentations to Raphy include not only this special issue but also a translation and adaptation to Hebrew by Tamar Raz of his latest book, Molecular Reaction Dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The Hebrew version will be published shortly under the auspices of the Open University of Israel. This special issue is a collection of papers related to Raphy's research interests. All the contributors were delighted to honor Raphy by dedicating a special article. We have arranged the papers the way Raphy approaches a problem: start with the observation then think how it might come about. In each section we went from the simpler and more detailed to the more complex. Curriculum Vitae Raphael D. Levine b. 29 March 1938, Alexandria, Egypt. M.Sc, 1960, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Israeli Army Service, 1960–1962; Ph.D., 1964, Nottingham University; D. Phil., 1966, Oxford University.