NMR Coin-Flip Game
A simple coin-flipping game to help students understand the origin of spin/spin splitting in 1H NMR.
A simple coin-flipping game to help students understand the origin of spin/spin splitting in 1H NMR.
This is an in class exercise that I use to introduce structure and magnetism to a junior/senior level course on bioinorganic chemistry. The class is cross-listed between Chemistry and Biochemistry. All of the students have had general chemistry and organic (with some exposure to MO Theory). Many of the students have also had the sophomore-level inorganic course, which delves extensively into MO theory, and some of the the students have also had the senior-level course on transition metal chemistry which looks deeply at d-orbital splitting.
This paper, while not fundamentally groundbreaking, serves as a nice introduction to the field of mesoporous materials. I like that it covers synthesis, characterization, and an application of the materials. I have used this paper in our senior seminar course as the basis for discussion of this area of chemistry. Discussion questions cover aspects of sol-gel chemistry, powder diffraction, gas adsorption, IR, solid state NMR, UV-Vis, and catalysis.
For years, I spent 2-3 days a semester working through Tanabe-Sugano diagrams, their development from terms, their evolution from Orgel diagrams, their analysis to give transition energies (the old ruler- trial and error analysis) and nephalauxetic parameters. Recently, colleagues in VIPEr convinced me that my time in class could be better spent, but I am not willing to completely give up on Tanabe-Sugano.
This is a lab experiment designed to cover an array of techniques, including metal complex synthesis, spectroscopy and electrochemistry. Overall, the goal is to synthesize the metal complex Ru(bpy)32+, exchange the counter ion to demonstrate changes in solubility, absorbance and emission properties (including excited state quenching through energy and electron transfer, and ground state oxidation), as well as cyclic voltammetry of the complex.
Early in 2009, Christopher Cummins’ group at MIT reported (in Science) the synthesis of AsP3, a compound that had never been isolated at room temperature. Later that year, a full article was published in JACS comparing the properties and reactivity of AsP3 to those of its molecular cousins, P4 and As4. The longer article is full of possibilities for discussion in inorganic chemistry courses, with topics including periodic trends, NMR, vibrational spectroscopy, electrochemistry, molecular orbital theory, and coordination chemistry.
This communication from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc.
This is a website which links to a wide variety of good quality YouTube mini-lectures on basic topics in chemistry, mathematics, physics and a variety of other sciences. Each video is about 10 minutes long and many go through example problems slowly and completely.