Abstract

Professor Marcel Utz
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of Virginia

Seminar: September 25, 2006
3:30-4:30pm
Mechanical Engineering, Room 339

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy as a Tool to Study Complex Materials.

NMR spectroscopy offers unique possibilities for the investigation of the molecular structure and dynamics of  complex materials. In particular, amorphous and partially liquid systems can benefit enormously from the highly specific information that NMR can provide. Much of the flexibility provided by NMR is due to the possibility to tailor the effective Hamiltonian acting on the nuclear spins, thus allowing to generate NMR spectra that contain the wanted information only. I will provide a brief introduction to the principles of nuclear magnetic resonance, with particular emphasis on solid samples, and then discuss several example cases, including the quantification of structural disorder in amorphous organic semiconductors, the determination of orientational distribution functions in deformed polymers, and the structural investigation of complex multi-phase materials via distant dipolar field effects. 

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