Orientation splitting technique

An applied stress lowers the symmetry of the crystal and can make defects with different orientations inequivalent. A review of stress techniques has been written by Davies (1988). The degeneracy of the ground state and also of the spectroscopic transition energies can be lifted. In this section we suppose that the defects cannot reorient and consider only the splitting of the transition energies. The stress-induced reorientation of defects is discussed in the next section. 

Lyotropic polymeric LC, formed by dissolving two aromatic polyamides in concentrated sulphuric acid, have been studied using variable-director 13C NMR experiments.324 The experimental line shapes at different angles w.r.t the external field were used to extract macromolecular order and dynamic in these ordered fluids. An interesting application of lyotropic LC is for the chiral discrimination of R- and S-enantiomers, and has recently been demonstrated by Courtieu and co-workers.325 The idea was to include a chiral compound 1-deutero-l-phenylethanol in a chiral cage (e.g., /1-cyclodextrin) which was dissolved and oriented by the nematic mean field in a cromolyn-water system. Proton-decoupled 2H NMR spectrum clearly showed the quad-rupolar splittings of the R- and S-enantiomers. The technique is applicable to water-soluble solutes. 

With this procedure, as with the double-resonance methods in atomic physics, Zeeman and Stark splittings, hyperfine structures and A doublings in molecules can be measured with high precision, even if the observed level splittings are far less than the optical dopp-ler width. From the width of the rf resonance and from the time response of the pumped systems, orientation relaxation rates can be evaluated for individual v J") levels. Other possible applications of this promising technique have been outlined by Zare 30) Experiments to test some of these proposals are currently under investigation and their results will be reported elsewhere. 

A more subtle application of the same technique involves isotopic substitution. Because most C02 frequencies are reproducible from crystal to crystal to within 0.07 cm ", it is possible to demonstrate small, but significant shifts of v3 when certain hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium. Analogous orientation effects have been reported for mixed crystals of isotopically substituted benzene, where isotopic differences in adjacent molecules gave rise to splittings as large as 4.7 cm "1 [91],... 

The symmetry and height of the rotational barriers and hence the tunnel splittings depend strongly on the orientation of the molecule and its adsorption site. The results of these measurements (a higher resolution experiment is planned) when combined with model calculations based on empirical atom-atom potentials (see below) may be able to provide corroborative evidence for the orientation of an adsorbed molecule as well as details of the molecule-substrate interaction. The principal obstacle to a wider application of the technique may simply be the small number of adsorbed systems in which these tunnel splittings can be observed. 

Several pathways have been pursued for the study of the splitting mechanism, often using simpler model systems than nucleosides, e.g. pyrimidine cyclobutane dimers (PyroPyr). Investigation of model systems has the advantage that spectroscopic techniques can be more readily applied and that they can be precisely controlled and manipulated in ways the natural system cannot. Whereas in DNA only pyrimidine cyclobutane dimers with a head-to-head (syn, s) orientation and cis... 

A powerful technique for the study of orientation and dynamics in viscoelastic media is line shape analysis in deuteron NMR spectroscopy [1]. For example, the average orientation of chain segments in elastomer networks upon macroscopic strain can be determined by this technique [22-31]. For a non-deformed rubber, a single resonance line in the deuterium NMR spectrum is observed [26] while the spectrum splits into a well-defined doublet structure under uniaxial deformation. It was shown that the usual network constraint on the end-to-end vector determines the deuterium line shape under deformation, while the interchain (excluded volume) interactions lead to splitting [26-31]. Deuterium NMR is thus able to monitor the average segmental orientation due to the crosslinks and mean field separately [31]. 

The importance of e.s.r. in this field is mainly in achieving a detailed characterization of radical structures. Because the resonance line due to the unpaired electron is split by magnetic nuclei in the radical in a very characteristic way, the technique actually counts the various types of nuclei and allows in many cases an accurate determination of their respective position and geometrical orientation. Patterns of relationships between structure and e.s.r. parameters, based on many experimental results, have been developed and applied to new systems successfully. Details of e.s.r. methods are given in many books and reviews on the subject (see especially Fessenden and Schuler, 1970 Wertz and Bolton, 1972). 

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