Abstract

Nick Funnell, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source PEARL – high pressure and neutrons

PEARL is the dedicated high-pressure powder diffractometer at the ISIS neutron and muon facility, designed around the large-volume Paris-Edinburgh press which is capable of applying multi-gigapascal pressures, whilst simultaneously exploring a wide temperature range. The use of pressure is an unrivalled thermodynamic tool for exploring the phase behaviour of materials; it provides the ability to access new, otherwise unobtainable, phases; tune material functionality; and push crystal structures to the limit of their stability.

This talk will present the current capabilities available on the PEARL instrument as well as ongoing developments for planned future use in the user programme. Lastly, some select examples of recent work on the instrument will be given.

Katharina Märker, Dept. of Chemistry, University of Cambridge Structure determination of organic nanotubes by DNP -enhanced solid-state NMR spectroscopy

Magic-angle spinning solid-state NMR is a powerful technique for structural studies, but often faces limitations due to its intrinsically low sensitivity. Recent ground-breaking developments in the field of dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) have enabled sensitivity enhancements of solid-state NMR experiments by several orders of magnitude, opening up exciting new possibilities for this field. The power of DNP -enhanced solid-state NMR for structure determination of organic solids at their natural isotopic abundance will be demonstrated in this talk. The increased sensitivity enables carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen interatomic distance measurements without the need of 13C and/or 15N isotopic enrichment. It will be shown that such dipolar recoupling based experiments provide invaluable information for structure determination, some of which would be nearly impossible to obtain with isotopically labeled samples.