Warwick Chemistry has played a lead role in securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 2 new Centres for Doctoral training, in Molecular Analytical Science and Diamond Science and Technology, as part of the recently announced UK's largest investment in postgraduate training in engineering and physical sciences. The Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, announced the funding of over seventy new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities on 22nd November.

For further information please visit:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_takes_share_of_163350m_to_train_tomorrow146s_engineers_and_scientists1

http://onlinepressoffice.tnrcommunications.co.uk/universities-funding/video 

In collaboration with the groups of Neil Wilson and Gavin Bell in Physics at Warwick and groups at the synchrotrons of ELETTRA in Trieste and SOLEIL in Paris, the Costantini group has published a Rapid Research Letter in the journal Physica Status Solidi on the natural doping of graphene grown on copper foil by chemical vapour deposition (CVD).

Using nano-spot angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) it has been shown that graphene grown on copper foil is undoped with an ideal gapless band structure, even after air exposure. Up to 200 °C annealing, the band structure is that of pristine undoped graphene but, upon annealing to 500 °C, the formation of a band gap is observed together with evidence of doping.

The work contributes to recent discussion on the electronic properties of technologically relevant graphene grown on low-cost copper foil. In the long-term, commercialisation of graphene will require economical techniques for its fabrication on a large scale. Therefore, its growth under low-pressure conditions on low-cost polycrystalline Cu foils represents a strong step towards a number of graphene applications.

Further details can be read at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pssr.201307224/abstract

An inter-university collaboration between the Costantini, Jones, Bonifazi (Namur) and de Vita (King’s College) groups showed the role of deprotonation on the two dimensional assembly of novel borazine compounds on a copper substrate. The results are published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Collaboration between the Costantini and Wills groups investigates the dissociation of a newly synthesised, novel chiral ester on metallic substrates. The products of dissociation are directly imaged by scanning tunnelling microscopy allowing for the delineation of the cleavage mechanism as seen in ChemComm.

The Gibson group have undertaken a detailed study into the ability of synthetic polymers to inhibit the growth of ice crystals - this is a fundmental process of incredible importance in biology (survival of extremophiles), medicine (cryoprotectection of cells/organs) and industry (preventing ice-induced damage). The Gibson group are pioneering the use of polymers as alternative to antifreeze proteins - Nature's cryoprotectants, using a combination of chemical, analytical, biological and computational methods

Read their latest paper here, in collaboration with R. Notman (CSC): http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm400217j

Ada Della Pia and Giovanni Costantini publish the Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy chapter for the Springer Surface Science Techniques book, Gianangelo Bracco and Bodil Holst (ed).

The O’Connor and Tosin groups have published work on the use of high mass accuracy tandem mass spectrometry for characterising the structures of polyketides, including erythromycin A, lasalocid A and iso-lasalocid A. They report in Analytical Chemistry on the use of Collision Activated Dissociation (CAD) and Electron Induced Dissociation (EID) as tools for determining structural information on these types of molecules. EID was shown to cause greater fragmentation of the compounds, complementary to that obtained using CAD, leading to more detailed structural information being obtained. These techniques were also combined in multistage mass spectrometry experiments, in order to use the fragmentation patterns to distinguish between lasalocid A and its isomer, iso-lasalcoid A. This work illustrates the potential of these tools and will be applied to identifying unknown polyketides and their biosynthetic intermediates.

The full article can be found at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac3022778

Sadler and Stavros groups in collaboration with Prof Martin Paterson at Heriot-Watt University, publish work in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The work describes the first demonstration of a 2-photon activated, square planar platinum (II) complex. The enhanced photolabilization demonstrated may be useful in the design of novel photoactivatable platinum chemotherapeutic agents in situations where deep tissue penetration is needed. Read the article here.

Costantini and co-workers publish in Physical Review B the results of a combined experimental-theoretical work that sheds light on the atomic scale-structure of MnSi thin films grown on Si(111).

Ada Della Pia and Giovanni Costantini publish the Scanning Tunneling Microscopy entry for the Springer Encyclopedia of Nanotechnology, Bharat Bhushan (ed).

Congratulations to PhD student Becky Wills, selected over more than 100 nominations as a winner of the PG Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence