The Department of Chemistry and Physics continues its Seminar series. Details for this week’s talk are given below.
Friday, 11/10/2023
3-4pm Eastern
Grote 411
Trevor Latendresse, Ph.D.
UTC Class of 2016 (CHEM)
Currently NIH Post-doctoral Scholar at Harvard University
The Controlled Design of Molecular Clusters for Nanomagnets and Multi-Electron Chemical Transformations
The interaction between two or more metal ions within polynuclear clusters can result in physical and chemical properties that are inaccessible for mononuclear compounds. To this end, the environment of the individual metal ions within a cluster and their proximity to one another should be finely tuned so that the M-M cooperation can be fully exploited. This talk outlines strategies for controlling the design of molecular clusters to enhance molecular functionality in areas of molecular magnetism and multi-electron redox chemistry.
Single-molecule magnets (SMMs) represent the smallest modifiable magnetic unit and are currently being pursued for the next generation of the data storage and processing devices. The first part of this talk describes how SMM performance can be improved using magnetic exchange coupling interactions between lanthanide ions within a single molecule. Here, a “building-block” approach is used to control the relative positioning of the lanthanide ions to one another, thus maximizing the strength of the magnetic coupling between them.
The ability to perform efficient multi-electron chemical transformations of molecular substrates has implications in areas such as N2 fixation, carbon capture, and the development of new energy storage technologies. The latter half of this talk describes how multi-electron redox chemistry can be mediated by polynuclear first-row transition metal clusters. Here, templating ligand scaffolds are used to proximally coordinate three metal ions, thus allowing for their intramolecular redox cooperation in the reduction of pnictogen group transfer reagents.