Dylan Morgan joined the group to work on his MChem project: “Visualisation of Aromaticity in Macrocycles”. The project is inspired by recent findings that anti-aromaticity in macrocycles provides a promosing route for the design of new battery anodes.
Aromaticity, despite its ubiquity in the discussions, is still surprisingly hard to visualise and quantify. We will endeavour to compare the different available techniques – nucleus-independent chemical shifts, current density plots, and the GIMIC method – with the goal of identifying the most promising ones and streamlining the workflows. In particular, we are interested in 1D, 2D, or even 3D scans of NICS values as inspired by a recent paper on excimers.
Welcome Dylan!