It has always been my dream to have the results of amateur chemistry published on a professional level, and recently I managed to do so! Some time ago
I published the crystal structure of erbium acetate tetrahydrate in the Cambridge Structural Database.
The structure had data collected with Mo-Kα radiation at 100 K out to a resolution of 0.49 Å (!!!!) and the model managed to refine down to an R
value of 1.46%. It's a massive improvement over the previously reported structures of this compound. If you have access to the database, its
identifier is JAXMAA.
The crystallographer at UW-Madison chemistry department, Dr. Ilia Guzei, has allowed me to freely share the data - this includes the CIF and all of
the raw frames taken from the experiment. I'm not sure if there's any freely available software that will allow you to read the Bruker SFRM format,
but I might actually work on writing a converter for them myself.
The total raw data is about 5 GB and I have yet to upload the files publicly, but I will report back when I have done so.
And here are the Er acetate crystals. I grew these by dissolving Er metal in aqueous acetic acid (diluted from glacial acid) and evaporating the
resulting decanted solution. These crystals can be grown quite easily, and I am hoping to eventually grow very large crystals of them (several cm in
size) because they are stable indefinitely and do not deliquesce or desolvate.
DraconicAcid - 3-4-2022 at 11:17
NICE!unionised - 3-4-2022 at 11:22
:-)Fulmen - 3-4-2022 at 11:25
Respect!j_sum1 - 3-4-2022 at 14:25
Great to have you back. It has been a while.
And what you have done is quite the achievement.clearly_not_atara - 4-4-2022 at 06:53
That's amazing. Congratulations! ^,^Bezaleel - 4-4-2022 at 23:15
Congratulations, Brain&Force!
Did you not have any issues regarding supersaturation when you evaporated your Er(OAc)3 solution?Liamatpm - 5-4-2022 at 04:34
Ok now that is pretty sweet!Bmoore55 - 5-4-2022 at 04:56
Excellent work!!! Congratulations!!!Brain&Force - 21-8-2023 at 09:55
Congratulations, Brain&Force!
Did you not have any issues regarding supersaturation when you evaporated your Er(OAc)3 solution?
Finally got back to this thread, but the acetates of Sm onward are extremely well-behaved and are currently my preferred source of lanthanide ions.
The solutions don't supersaturate to a point which causes issues. For Nd, however, the crystals are prone to decomposition (I suspect via the loss of
water) and Pr acetate doesn't form nice crystals at all.
As a side note, all the raw frame data is available by request (send me a U2U - I don't check here often but I'll get back to you ASAP). I've attached
the CIF if that's of interest.
Attachment: 2157262.cif (5.5MB) This file has been downloaded 112 times
littlesky - 9-12-2023 at 22:27
Congratulations! Hopefully I can publish my amateur research in a professional journal as well!
