Speaker: Prof. Tony Cheetham

Date and Time: 10:30-11:30am, October 11, 2017

Venue: Meeting Room 308, IPE Building

Title：Advanced Techniques for the Structural Characterisation of Polycrystalline Materials

Abstract：

In order to understand the mechanisms of aggregation-induced emission, it is often important to have a detailed understanding of the solid state structures of the corresponding materials. In cases where good quality single crystals of the materials are available, then the structures can normally be determined with considerable accuracy. However, in the event that the materials are only available in polycrystalline form, the determination of the structure can be challenging. Fortunately, a number of powerful tools are now available to address this problem, including the ab initio determination of structures from powder diffraction data [1], the characterisation of poorly crystalline materials by using Pair Distribution Functions (PDFs) [2], and high resolution solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance [3]. The presentation will discuss these methods and give some recent examples where they have been applied in the characterisation of polycrystalline solids. We shall also illustrate the use of these methods to follow the crystallisation of materials from solution [4] and open pore – closed pore transtions in metal-organic frameworks [5].
1. A. K. Cheetham and A. L. Goodwin, Nature Mater. 13, 760 (2014)
2. T. Proffen and S. J. L. Billinge, J. Appl. Cryst. 32, 572, (1999)
3. S. P. Brown and H. W. Spiess, Chem. Rev. 101, 4125 (2001)
4. H. H.-M. Yeung, Y. Wu, S. Henke, A. K. Cheetham, D. O’Hare and R. I. Walton, Angew. Chem. Intl. Ed. Eng. 55, 2012 (2016)
5. M. T. Wharmby, S. Henke, T. D. Bennett, S. Bajpe, S. P. Thompson, C. Mellot-Draznieks, and A. K. Cheetham, Angew. Chem. Intl. Ed. 54, 6447 (2015)

About the speaker:

Tony Cheetham is the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge and the Treasurer and Vice President of the Royal Society. He obtained his D.Phil. at Oxford in 1971 and did post-doctoral work in the Materials Physics Division at Harwell. He joined the Chemistry faculty at Oxford in 1974, and then moved to UC Santa Barbara in 1991 to become Professor in the Materials Department. In 1992 he took up the Directorship of the new Materials Research Laboratory, which he led for 12 years. Cheetham was the Director of the International Center for Materials Research at UCSB for three years before moving to Cambridge in 2007.
Cheetham’s research has spanned both inorganic materials and metal-organic frameworks, and he has received numerous awards for his work. These include the Somiya Award of the IUMRS (2004), the Platinum Medal of the IOM3 (2011), and a Chemical Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Chemists (2014). He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others, and holds honorary doctorates from Versailles (2006), St. Andrews (2011), Tumkur (2011) and Warwick (2015).