The Development and Testing of an Instrument for Doing Fast Time-Resolved Infrared Spectroscopy and the Study of Dimanganese Decacarbonyl Using UV/VIS and FTRIR Spectroscopic Techniques
Over the past three years at Union College, an instrument has been developed that can be used to probe the mechanisms of the photochemistry of transition metal carbonyl compounds. When these complexes are activated with photons, one or two carbonyl ligands are removed from the complex, opening these sites for chemical bonding. Thus, the coordinatively unsaturated species become catalytically active, and can catalyze a wide variety of organic reactions. The intermediates in these catalytic cycles tend to be short-liver lifetimes are usually less than one second), and therefore special instrumnetation must be developed in order to directly observe these intermediates spectrally
