9302468 Field This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation Program will assist the Department of Chemistry at the University of Montana in the purchase of a 300 MHz, multinuclear, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. This new instrumentation will enhance greatly research in a number of areas including the following: 1) Solution dynamics of main group-transition metal clusters, 2) Anomalously large kinetic deuterium isotope effects in transition metal cluster hydrides, 3) The chemistry of low oxidation state metal clusters in water, 4) Chemical mechanisms in thermal polymerization of glycosides and in pyrolysis of polysaccharides, 5) Hydrogen/deuterium kinetic isotope effects using unlabeled (natural abundance) reagents, 6) Solution chemistry of triplet cyclohepta-trienylidene and triplet cyclonona-tetraenylidene, 7) Competition kinetics in the cycloheptatri- enylidene/cycloheptatetraene system, 8) Development of methodology for the synthesis of homochiral compounds containing nitrogen. %%% A nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer is used to obtain information about molecular structure (what types of carbon and/or hydrogen atoms are present, what are the relative number of each type of atoms and how are they connected to one another in the molecule) and molecular dynamics (how rapidly are the various parts of the molecule moving). This instrument is essential for any meaningful, modern synthetic chemistry research program. ***
