Even though it was awful being sick, when I went back to lab I had some really nice results! The crystals I had been getting before had been making long stacked chains, which although that's still cool, wasn't really what Tim and Prof. Abrahams had been hoping to see. Fortunately for me, one of the crystallizations I set up yielded some really nice blue copper crystals that had a completely novel structure! We describe it as a having 4 interpenetrating diamond networks.
A diamond network is made up of adamantane units. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diamondoids.png In 1, you see one unit and, in 2-4, you see the addition of successive units. Because of the ligand and metal I used, the diamond-like network has a lot of space in it. As a result, we can put things in this excess space. In the case of my crystals, one of the networks will interpenetrate 3 more identical diamond-like networks in this space. In the picture below, each color represents a single, individual network. Each network is made up of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, copper, and hydrogen.
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| The four identical, interpenetrating diamond-like networks. |
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| I've omitted the other 3 networks for clarity and tried to illustrate the single adamantane unit in white. |
I have been trying to set up variations of this in hopes of getting similar kinds of results with other metals. Hopefully I'll have something nice after the weekend!
Stephanie
Stephanie
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