ICNI — 2nd International Conference on Noncovalent Interactions

Noncovalent interactions are ubiquitous in Nature and contribute to the cohesion of chemical systems. If their existence was long suspected they were firstly taken into consideration by van der Waals in 1873, helping to revise the equation of state for real gases. In comparison to covalent bonds, intra- and intermolecular noncovalent interactions are in general locally weak and exhibit much lower energy and directionality, as reflected by the term “noncovalent”. Nevertheless, in many cases these interactions can collectively play a dominant role in synthesis, catalysis and design of materials. In the first half of the 20th century, these properties have already fueled passionate debates on their origin and nature particularly with the emergence of quantum chemistry with the works of Schrödinger and London. Thus, the chemistry of this century is expected to be largely driven by noncovalent interactions and it was timely to establish a general/regular series of International Conferences on Noncovalent Interactions (ICNI), the first one of which was inaugurated on 2-6 September 2019 in Lisbon.

Topics: physical chemistry, Noncovalent Interactions