Kamel GADALLAH

Al-Azhar University - Egypt
Visiting Scholar invited by research center LERMA
Curriculum Vitae
 

Research project

Hydrogenation of acetaldehyde : an exception in the growth of the molecular complexity?

It is now established that hydrogenation on the surface of interstellar grains is a powerful catalytic process at work in denser part of space. This process is considered in astrobiology as the foundation of prebiotic chemistry. The emblematic example is that of methanol (Watanab&Kouchi 2002) or water formation (Dulieu et al 2010), but recent examples show that it is possible to synthesize peptide bonds (Dulieu et al 2019) or sugars (Chuang et al 2019) by hydrogenation. However, hydrogenation does not always lead to saturation (Noble et al 2015). For this project we want to revisit the case of acetaldehyde, because in preliminary work it seemed to us that not only saturation did not occur efficiently, but also that the molecules undergo a strong fragmentation, making acetaldehyde a molecule reducing the molecular complexity on the surface of the grains. It is this hypothesis that we want to verify during the guest's stay at LERMA.