Dr Jacqui Cole awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry SAC Silver Medal 2009

Distinguished for her role in the development of novel approaches in Neutron Diffraction and Photo-Crystallography and their application to establishing structure/property relationships for materials of interest to the optic and optoelectronic community.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's SAC Silver Medal is awarded to a young scientist under the age of 35, working in any field covering the practice and teaching of the analytical sciences. The presentation of the award will take place at the Analytical Research Forum meeting of the Analytical Division (July 2009) where, as is traditional for the Silver Medallist, she will give a lecture on her research.

Dr Cole is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in Physics, and a Senior Research Fellow of St Catharine's College.

Photo-crystallography: Dr Cole has been working on the technical and scientific developments of this new crystallographic technique since 1999. She has employed single-crystal X-ray diffraction to afford the light-induced changes to the three-dimensional crystal structure of optically-active materials [1]. Since her experiments often necessitate synchrotron irradiation, she has worked closely with staff at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France [2], and the Synchrotron Radiation Source at the Daresbury Laboratory, UK. Results that reveal entirely new structural chemistry are already prevailing [e.g. 3]. The technical developments associated with this work are now being imported to the single-crystal diffraction beamline (I19) at the Diamond Light Source, the new UK synchrotron located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Oxfordshire. The provision of this new generation synchrotron technology for photo-crystallographic research affords exciting prospects for further experiments in this area.

Neutron Diffraction: In this area, Dr Cole has undertaken some novel experiments, in order to reveal R…R separations in rare-earth (R) phosphate glasses. The closest R…R separation dictates the optical and magnetic properties in these materials, and so it was a very important parameter to determine from a materials-centred perspective. It was not possible to obtain this information using conventional diffraction and spectroscopy techniques. This led Cole and co-workers to realise these R…R separations via the world's first successful examples of a magnetic difference neutron diffraction experiment [4], and a full anomalous neutron scattering experiment [5], on an amorphous material. These experiments were undertaken at the ISIS Facility, Oxfordshire, and the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, respectively. Publication of these findings has directly influenced other people in the field of amorphous materials to turn to these techniques to combat similar materials-centred problems.

J. M. Cole, "Photocrystallography", Acta Crystallogr. A64 (2008) 259-271.
J. M. Cole, P. R. Raithby, M. Wulff, F. Schotte, A. Plech, S. J. Teat, G. Bushnell-Wye, "Nanosecond time-resolved single-crystal X-ray diffraction: case study and instrument development for high-resolution excited-state structure determination", J. Chem. Soc. Faraday Discuss. 122, (2002) 119-129.
K. F. Bowes, J. M. Cole, S. L. G. Husheer, P. R. Raithby, T. Savarese, H. A. Sparkes, J. E. Warren, "Metastable light-induced crystal structure of photoisomerised SO₂:η¹-OSO coordinated [Ru(OSO)(NH₂)₄(H₂O)][Tos]₂", J. Chem. Soc, Chem. Commun. (2006) 2448-2450.
J. M. Cole, A. C. Hannon, R. A. Martin, R. J. Newport, "Direct observation of R…R distances in rare-earth (R) phosphate glasses by magnetic difference neutron diffraction". Phys Rev B 73 (2006) 104210(1-5).
J. M. Cole, A. C. Wright, R. J. Newport, C.E. Fisher, S. J. Clarke, R. N. Sinclair, H. E. Fisher, G. J. Cuello, "The structure of the rare-earth phosphate glass, (Sm₂O₃)_0.205(P₂O₅)_0.795 studied by anomalous dispersion neutron diffraction", J. Phys. Cond. Matt. 19 (2007) 056002(1-12).