Structure Sensitive Reaction Kinetics of Chiral Molecules on Intrinsically Chiral Surfaces.

Enantiospecific heterogeneous catalysis utilizes chiral surfaces to resolve enantiomers via structure sensitive surface chemistry. The catalyst design challenge is the identification of chiral surface structures that maximize enantiospecificity. Herein, we develop data driven models for the enantiospecificity of tartaric acid reactions on chiral Cu() surfaces. Measurements of enantiospecific rate constants were obtained by using curved Cu() surfaces that enable kinetic measurements on hundreds of chiral surface orientations. One model uses feature vectors derived from generalized coordination numbers to capture the local structure around Cu atoms exposed by the Cu() surfaces. The second model introduces the use of chiral cubic harmonic functions to capture the symmetry constraints of the face-centered cubic Cu structure. The model using 58 generalized coordination numbers has a fitting error similar to that of the model using only 5 cubic harmonic functions. The two models predict maxima in the enantiospecificity on surfaces with very similar surface orientations. The models developed in this work are applicable for any enantiospecific reaction happening on any chiral material with a cubic lattice structure, opening the way to understanding the surface structure sensitivity of the enantiospecific reaction kinetics.