Instrument Development Plan for Chemistry at the University of Minnesota

This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities Program will assist the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in the purchase of a high resolution mass spectrometer, x-ray diffractometer, and a high field NMR spectrometer. The faculty members whose research is dependent upon mass spectroscopy will greatly benefit from the acquisition of these instruments. Research projects to be carried out with these instruments include: (1) Probing Nucleation Phenomena in Chemical Vapor Depositions; (2) Gas Phase Ion-Molecule Reactions; (3) An Investigation of Multielectron Transfer Reactions in Organometallic Complexes; (4) Synthesis and Characterization of Transition Metal-Gold Cluster Compounds; (5) Synthetic Modeling of Copper-Nitrogen Oxide Interactions in Proteins and Heterogeneous Catalysts and Development of C3-Symmetric and Optically Active Polypyrazole; (6) Surface Chemistry of Chromatography Stationary Phases; (7) Stacking Faults and Polytypism in Nanocrystalline Materials; (8) Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) by Linear Chain Pt Compounds; (9) NMR Studies of Metal Oxide Catalysts; and (10) Catalysis with Supported Transition Metal-Gold Cluster Compounds. A high resolution mass spectrometer is an instrument used to measure the precise molecular weight of a molecular ion. This information is an important piece of data used to help determine the atomic composition and, sometimes, the molecular geometry of a molecule. It is one of the essential tools needed to learn the detailed structure of newly synthesized molecules. The x-ray diffractometer is used to make accurate and precise measurements of the full three- dimensional structure of a molecule. The information obtained gives the precise values of all the bond distances and bond angles of a given molecule and it gives accurate information about the spatial arrangement of that molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NM R) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies are useful in the areas such as polymers and catalysis, and in biology.