Self Assembly of Radicals and Other Species

In order to fully explore and apply interactions between unpaired electrons we are investigating self-assembled metal coordination compounds. Our initial foray into this area involved diamagnetic hydrazone ligands and zinc ions, allowing us to use NMR as an analytical tool. This resulted in a joint publication with the research group of Jean-Marie Lehn (Barboiu et al. 2006) and a more recent study using dynamic NMR (Dutta et al. 2011). One of the grid complexes from this paper is shown below.

We are currently exploring paramagnetic analogs of these initial systems. We are also conducting basic research into the properties of hydrazones as ligands (Wood et al, 2004, Ly et al. 2011)