This award supports Professor W. E. Billups of Rice University to collaborate in research with Dr. Roland Boese of the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Essen, West Germany. The objective of their joint research is to determine the structures of very unstable molecules of theoretical interest. Dr. Boese and his co-workers have developed an apparatus to crystallize liquids on an x-ray diffractometer at low temperatures by means of a miniature zone melting procedure with focused infrared light. He has been able to determine very accurate structures of unstable inorganic compounds. Dr. Billups has developed a vacuum gas phase procedure for the synthesis of small ring cycloalkanes and other highly strained organic compounds. The innovative experimental techniques they have introduced have had wide but separate applicability. The plan for the collaboration combines their virtually unique expertise through the synthesis and preliminary characterization of the compounds at Rice University and then determination of their precise structures using the unusual equipment at Essen. Small ring cycloalkanes have aroused great interest because their high energy content relative to their acyclic isomers often results in unexpected properties. Progress in this area has been slowed by the extreme difficulty of structural analysis of such highly unstable compounds. The successful application of the Boese technique to the acquisition of good structural data by low temperature x-ray crystallography would be a boon to physical organic chemists engaged in structural chemistry. In addition, the technique, once accessible to the chemical community as a whole, will find wide application in the structural analysis of small unstable molecules.
