The Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program will provide a grant to Franklin and Marshall College for Dr. Ronald Musselman to determine polarizations of intense electronic transitions related to conductivity in new materials and to bonding in metalloprotein models using a unique Polarized Specular Reflectance microspectrophotometer. This is a renewal proposal describing a highly collaborative effort with Dr. Steven Watkins of Louisiana State University, Dr. Don Ellis and Dr. Brian Hoffman of Northwestern University, Dr. H. J. Keller of the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Alberto Flamini of the National Research Council of Italy, and Dr. Edward Solomon of Stanford. The work at Franklin and Marshall College will involve six undergraduate students who will participate in making the measurements and in doing the calculations on a variety of complexes that are of chemical and biochemical interest. This program will help to refine the theoretical treatment of conductive square-planar metal complexes, and of their molecular precursors. A series of structurally related square planar metal complexes will be synthesized allowing systematic comparisons to be made between experiment and theory and thus enhancing our understanding of the electronic properties of these types of compounds. This program will address the fundamental nature of the interaction of light with new materials. The materials of interest range from electronically conducting materials to systems with biological significance such as enzymes. Often the characteristics of these materials which make them intrinsically interesting also cause them to completely absorb the light normally used to probe the nature of the system. The unique feature of this work is the ability to probe these systems using a reflectance technique (specular reflectance) which provides information closely related to that normally obtained by absorbance methods. Experimental measurements will be performed and the results will be interpreted using sophisticated calculations in order to gain fundamental new insights into the behavior of such systems. Specific knowledge concerning the nature of the chemical bonding in these systems will result from this work, and it has implications for understanding how electrons are transmitted within and how light interacts with conducting materials.
