Professors Regitze and Robert Vold have been awarded a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program for research using very large magnetic fields to study the structure of solids and "ordered" liquids. This work will allow us to better understand the underlying principles of the structure and dynamics of condensed matter. This project focuses on several topics of current interest e.g. the mechanism of alkyl chain motion in channel clathrates,in layered intercalation compounds and alkylated clusters; the effects of specific interactions such as hydrogen bonding on internal rotations in molecular crystals; and the molecular reorientation in liquid crystals. Advantage will be taken of recently developed techniques for comparing the individual spectral densities of motion obtained from experiments with those obtained from molecular dynamics calculations. Particular advantage will be taken of a new magnetic resonance technique developed by the Volds called frequency stepping in order to greatly reduce the usual line broadening problems associated with isotopes whose nuclear spin average is greater than one half.
