Another day of research at UA chemistry

(This is a Dany Joumaa production, in case you were wondering. A shortfall of blogger seems to be its inability to place bylines at the top of the blog post. For any casual reader of this blog, that is annoying.)

Things are finally getting up to speed.

Today I began my lab work. My first goal was to recrystallize a compound known as Eu(DBM)3. "Whoa whoa, stop there; what the heck does this mean?!" you exclaim. Well, let's start with the compound: Eu(DBM)3 is part of a compound that I will use for testing and comparison between three compounds that emit the same color red. However, as discussed in my previous lab posts, these compounds all have different surrounding molecules (known as ligands) that change the efficiency of each complex to become excited and give light emission. My goal is to determine which ligand configuration results in the highest efficiency and, therefore, best for emitting the color red.

Now for the first part: recrystallization involves taking a compound whose structure you know and purifying it as much as possible. There are two ways to do it: you can either take a solution of your compound and manipulate its temperature such that you end up with a crystalline solid "purer" than it was initially (through the clever choice of solvent, that is), or you can mix your solution with a solvent and an "antisolvent" over a long period of time, also yielding small "purer" crystalline solids of your compound.

With me so far? I hope that doesn't sound boring, as I promise, when you're actually doing it and getting into the specifics, it's not. Stepping into a lab and being surrounded by tools of all sorts gets me excited. A recording studio does the same thing to me. Like a studio, there are very well-defined lab procedures and techniques in the lab that ensure a successful experiment. Almost folk-like manners of methodology dominate the lab -- a specific way to hold a pipet, a specific way to transport a chemical across the room, a specific way to mix a solute with its solvent -- it's not hard to see why a cook may be considered a specialized chemist. Likewise, it is also not hard to see why I find much enjoyment from working in a lab. The required attention to detail and finesse is present and ever-so necessary.

Thus has the recrystallization process begun. During my work I found that the recommended solvent for the compound in question actually did a poor job of dissolving my compound -- so much so that, unless Dr. Zheng and I experiment with different solvents, recrystallization could take 24 hours under heated conditions! Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of chemicals discovered by Dr. Zheng just this morning that would surely impede my process if these chemicals are not replenished soon. Hopefully they arrive before I reach a standstill during my time in the lab.

Finally, I will receive my first (and possibly last) lesson in computational chemistry from a grad student on Thursday. Now this is particularly exciting. Recall that my other goal in the Zheng lab is to match up my experimental results with a theoretical model. That is to say, after I've figured out to model a water molecule on a computer (using time-independent Schrodinger equations, mind you), I will model part of the coordination complex, and then the whole complex. This will allow me to play God and bend the physical laws of the universe to my chemical will -- actually, it will, when done properly, allow those who work on this project in the future to have a better idea of what chemical expectations should be had for an efficient light-emitting compound. In the grand scheme of things, this is done so that when Lady GaGa (unfortunately) performs on the Grammys 20 years from now, you will be able to see every detail on the screen at any given viewing angle, and you can be proud that you have done so with minimal environmental impact.

Ah yes, the things we do for entertainment.