March 2010 Meeting
The three hundred and eighty-eighth meeting of the American Chemical Society Susquehanna Valley Section will be held on Wednesday, 3 March 2010 at Susquehanna University in 316 Fisher Science Hall. The speaker will be Dr. Raymond Schaak, of The Pennsylvania State University, who will present a talk entitled "Metallurgy in a Beaker: Chemical Toolkit for Solid-State Synthesis". The meeting will be preceded by a reception and dinner.Directions: see below
Reception and Dinner: 5:30 p.m., at BJ's Steak & Rib House. Ordering will be from the menu. If you are interested in attending the dinner please RSVP to Geneive Henry at henry@susqu.edu or 570.372.4222 by 4:00 p.m. on Monday, 1 March 2010.
Meeting and Presentation: 7:30 p.m. in 316 Fisher Science Hall. Brief Local Section announcements will be followed by our guest presentation.
"Metallurgy in a Beaker: Chemical Toolkit for Solid-State Synthesis"
Most inorganic solids with extended structures are synthesized using high-temperature (> 1000°C) reactions, because solid-solid diffusion is usually the rate-limiting step in their formation. An unfortunate consequence of the large amount of thermal energy required to initiate solid-state reactions is that the products tend to be the equilibrium phases that are most thermodynamically stable for a given composition. Solids that are less stable (e.g. phases that fall into a local energy minimum rather than the global minimum for a given system) are generally inaccessible as isolatable bulk-scale solids. We have been developing alternative low-temperature (< 400°C) chemical methods for synthesizing solid-state materials, and these methods often succeed in accessing non-equilibrium phases. Our strategy merges advances in solution chemistry routes to metal nanoparticles with more exotic targets from solid-state chemistry and condensed matter physics. Using a toolkit of solution chemistry reactions that include both simple benchtop strategies and air-sensitive Schlenk line techniques, we are able to produce nanocrystalline samples of many classes of solids that are challenging or impossible to synthesize using traditional high-temperature methods. Since these synthetic methods are directly compatible with those used to produce high-quality shape- and size-controlled nanocrystals, we can also explore the dependence of important physical properties on size and morphology. This talk will focus on recent advances in solid-state systems that include AuCuSn2, Au3M (M = Fe, Co, Ni), ZnX (X = S, Se), and MnSe.
Dr. Raymond Schaak is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and a member of the Materials Research Institute at Penn State University. Dr. Schaak received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Lebanon Valley College in 1998. In 2001 he received a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from Penn State University under the direction of Prof. Thomas Mallouk, where he developed the concept of "solid-state retrosynthesis" for the stepwise and predictable topotactic synthesis of bulk and nanostructured perovskite-based oxide materials. From 2001 - 2003, he was a postdoctoral research associate with Prof. Robert Cava at Princeton University, where he worked on the synthesis and physical property characterization of metal carbide, boride, phosphide, oxide, and alloy superconductors. In 2003, Dr. Schaak began his independent career as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. In 2007, he moved to Penn State University as an Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure. His research group focuses on developing new chemical strategies for the synthesis of nanoscale solid-state materials and applying these materials to problems at the forefront of modern materials research. Dr. Schaak has received several prestigious awards, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1999), an NSF CAREER Award (2006), a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2006), a DuPont Young Professor Grant (2006), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2007).
Directions to the University:
From Route I-80 West: Take the Danville exit, 224. Take route 54 east to route 11 south towards Selinsgrove. Continue left on route 11/15 south (continue as directed below from route 11/15).
From Route I-80 East: Take the Lewisburg exit, 210A. Take route 15 south towards Selinsgrove. Turn right onto route 11/15 south(continue as directed below from route 11/15).
Route 11/15 south becomes Market Street. Turn right onto W. Pine Street. West Pine Street becomes University Avenue. Follow the campus map to visitor parking.
View directions and a campus map.
Directions to BJ's Steak & Rib House: visit the map page to help find your way to 17 North Market Street Selinsgrove, Pennsylania.
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