A Time for a Change: Sabbatical Phase II

I have enjoyed the past four months at the bench. I would not say that I completed any individual project and therefore Phase I will blend with Phase II for at least a while. I was very pleased to find a project that appears to be new and also relevant. The fact that the starting materials could not be purchased pure and the lack of a good, in-house spectroscopic handle for the product means that everything that I did was dependant on creating and isolating crystalline compounds. In that sense the project was a failure. The work however revealed exactly what needs to be done for the project to go forward. I think I can do that over the next four months by going to UNB for two days a week to essentially work up reactions from previous weeks and set-up new reactions for the week. That will hopefully allow me to generate samples for spectroscopic analysis. The spectroscopic methods that I will hopefully will use will run the whole "spectrum" (if you will excuse the pun).

Uv-visible : the compounds are coloured and this will need to be done once we has isolated crystals of pure compounds. The spectra will show us what the pi systems in the double bonds are doing but this method is very sensitive to minor impurities if they are highly coloured. The challenge for this method is that we will need to make special cells so that samples dissolved in SO2 can be measured.

ESR (electron spin resonance) if the compounds have unpaired electrons then this method must be used to measure the environment that the unpaired electron lives in. In many ways this can be complementary to Uv-visible and both of these methods can be modelled by high level calculations.

Vibrational spectroscopy (IR; infra-red and Raman) these complementary methods are measured by dramatically different techniques but when combined gives a complete picture of all the molecular bonds in a chemical compound. IR is dead easy to measure with just about any heatlight source and a heat detector. Raman is a very different method and the main reason why Phase II will mostly occur at a different University. UNB is a two hour drive to the west from ABU while MtA is a half hour drive to the east. At MtA however they have just installed a research grade Raman instrument and it will be my job in this phase of my sabbatical to learn how to use the Raman and make some publication quality measurements with it. This will all be new work for me and I am looking forward to it.

If this sabbatical is going to generate publishable research it will happen in the next four months or not at all. So the pressure is on.