Thomas Burden was running a lot of chromatography columns when he was a PhD student at the University of York in 2022. Purifying compounds using flash column chromatography can take its toll on the psyche, but luckily for Burden, his project involved making colorful, crystalline coumarin derivatives like this one. Coumarin is a natural compound that glows blue under ultraviolet light, and as Burden added various functional groups to the molecule’s rim, that fluorescence shifted to green and orange.
Burden’s research focused on looking for new catalysts that could replace bonds between carbon and hydrogen atoms with new bonds. Specifically, his catalysts contained common metals—manganese in this case. Burden still isn’t sure why the crystals fluoresce two different colors, but he assumes it has to do with the solids crystallizing in different ways.
Submitted by Thomas Burden. Read his paper in ACS Organic & Inorganic Au.
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