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Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann
Tuesday, September 25, 2018, 11:00am - 12:00pm
 

hoffmann e0914Nobel Prize Laureate Roald Hoffmann

Cornell University 

Hosted by Professor John Brennan

Tuesday September 25, 2018

11:00AM, CCB* Auditorium

*New Chemistry and Chemical Biology Building

"Two New Games for Carbon, We Hope"

Clathrate structures, large polyhedral networks, can be built from any node that favors tetrahedral four-coordination – be it water, SiO2 or group 14 elements. Those constructed of C alone have never been made, even as they are pretty close to diamond in stability. Tao Zeng’s work suggests a strategy for making these, incorporating lithiums into the cavities, and substituting B in the carbon cages around. 

Recently CH nanothreads, one-dimensional, likely disordered, near completely saturated polymers of benzene, have been made and visualized in the slow decompression of benzene at 20 GPa, by John Badding’s group at Penn State. Bo Chen in our group has explored theoretically the building up of these, through stepwise polymerization of benzene into one-dimensional chains with varying degrees of  unsaturation. 

And graphanes, not one, but several, the CH stoichiometry global minima, are still waiting to be made, reproducibly.

~Coffee/tea will be served prior to lecture~