Chemical physics and the condensed phase : NMR studies in a liquid-crystal testing ground

• Main Author: Weber, Adrian C. J.
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27241

Liquid crystals are an excellent media for the study of the condensed phase by NMR spectroscopy since the highly accurate proton dipolar couplings do not average to zero as they do in the isotropic condensed phase. Of course we can also take the opposite view and seek to understand the behavior of individual molecules and the effect of the condensed phase on them and so the impetus for studies of solutes in liquid crystals is two fold. By coupling theory to experiment via dipolar couplings one can gain insight into aspects of chemical physics and the condensed phase provided the spectra can be solved. As the number of spins of a molecule and its lack of symmetry increase so do the complexity of NMR spectra of solutes in orientationally ordered phases. Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategies (CMA-ES) have proven to be remarkably useful towards the end of obtaining dipolar couplings from congested spectra. In essence this algorithm uses the principles of natural selection coupled with an aspect of cross-generational memory to find the set of spectral parameters at the global minima of an error surface which reproduce the experimental spectrum. It is not an overstatement to say this tool has significantly altered the allocation of efforts in the area of research presented here. In the research herein two approaches are employed which are complimentary. In the first chapters we use a diversity of solutes to test postulated interaction Hamiltonians intended to describe the intermolecular environment of nematic and smectic A phases. The putative Hamiltonians are fitted to solute order parameters obtained from dipolar couplings. Once an explicit form is obtained, reasonable speculation is made concerning what the Hamiltonian can tell us about the intermolecular environment of the condensed phases studied. In the latter chapters the complimentary view is taken. Specifically we attempt to understand how internal rotations of molecules are affected by the condensed phase environment. To this end is considered the simplest example in n-butane. Again by obtaining dipolar couplings we can use a variety of theoretical tools in an attempt to exploit the full accuracy of these anisotropic spectral parameters and gain insight into the effect of a condensed phase on configurational statistics. These phenomena are also studied as a function of temperature.