Last revised - 25 October, 2000. Honours research projects are designed as part of frontier research in these areas, with prospects for exciting discoveries but also with assured results for the honours thesis. Projects are moulded to student interests. With the newly installed external ion sources, including an electrospray source, a cluster source, and a laser ablation source, it will be possible to introduce many new inorganic species into the ion trap. Supramolecular inorganic chemistry and crystal engineering Supramolecular chemistry involves non-bonded associations of molecules, vital in molecular biology and significant in all fields of chemistry.
Supramolecular interactions occur every time a molecular compound crystallises.
When inorganic molecules with distinctive electronic, spectroscopic and magnetic properties are incorporated there are opportunities for formation of special solid state materials. The goals of research here are to recognise and understand the supramolecular interactions in crystals, and then to design and crystallise compounds which deploy those principles. This project involves computer modelling, synthesis, crystallisation, and crystal structure analysis. Density functional quantum theory, as implemented in the program DMol, provides an excellent method for mapping the structures, energies, and reactivities of these molecules. This project involves taking a set of unprecedented inorganic molecules, and investigating the structural principles which control them.