Imina Technologies' microprobing solutions are extremely versatile and can serve as precise manipulators to pick up single microcrystals for X-ray diffraction.
Semiconducting carbon nitride polymers are used in metal-free photocatalysts and in opto-electronic devices. To better control their synthesis, Dr.
David Burmeister and his colleagues under the lead of Prof. Dr. Emil List-Kratochvil, Prof. Dr.
Michael J. Bojdys from Humboldt University of Berlin studied how euthectic salt melts can be used to catalyze the ionothermal synthesis of carbon nitride materials. Euthectic salts are a mix of different salts with lower melting temperature than each salt separately, here alkali metal halides: LiCl/KCl, LiBr/KBr, and LiI/KI).
In their recently published work, authors used single-crystal X-ray diffraction to identify the crystalline product of one the reactions. They used miBots to pick single crystals from the surrounding amorphous phase. The tip of a miBot prober under an optical microscope was dipped in oil to improve adhesion, picked up the single crystal and carefully transferred it onto the sample holder with a 10 μm loop also dip-coated with oil.
The crystals turned out to be melem hydrate C₆N₁₀H₆. Melem is structurally similar to melamine (a triazine ring (C₃N₃) bonded to three amine groups (–NH₂)) but has a network of three triazine units linked together.
