Previous Papers/Thesis
You may download a copy of my thesis in a pdf format. This document is copyrighted and held at University of California library. This should be for personal use only and not for any commercial use. Each chapter/section is a separate file (so that none are too huge) so feel free to download all or none of these.

Thesis0 Thesis1 Thesis2 Thesis3.1 Thesis3.2 Thesis3.3 Thesis4
Thesis5 Thesis6 Thesis7 Thesis8

This paper was my first work as an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Utah titled "Polyethylene Crystallinity from Static Solid-State NMR Spectra", C.D. Hughes, N.K. Sethi, J.H. Baltisberger and D. Grant, Macromolecules,22, 2551-2554 (1989).
Crystallinity of Polyethylene

This was my first project as a graduate student at UC Berkeley continuing the work by K. Mueller and others titled "Isotropic Chemical Shifts and Quadrupolar Parameters for Oxygen-17 Using Dynamic-Angle Spinning NMR", K.T. Mueller, J.H. Baltisberger, E.W. Wooten and A. Pines, Journal of Physical Chemistry,96, 7001-7004 (1992).
¹⁷O DAS experiments on silicates at two fields

This project started as I was evaluating some of the other nuclei on the periodic table for ease of study by DAS. We found a paper by Ellis and coworkers that led us to the five salts studied in this work. We subsequently looked for other Rb containing systems to study with DAS and were rather unsuccessful. However the long term value of this work is that now people seem to use ⁸⁷Rb as the standard nucleus to tune up DAS, MQMAS and DOR experiments. The paper that started the flood in this field is "⁸⁷Rb Dynamic-Angle Spinning NMR Spectroscopy of Inorganic Rubidium Salts", J.H. Baltisberger, S.L. Gann, E.W. Wooten, T.H. Chang, K.T. Mueller and A. Pines, Journal of the American Chemical Society,114, 7489-7493 (1992).
DAS on Rb Salts

One of the papers written on Dynamic-Angle hopping is reproduced here in pdf format. This was published as "Dynamic-Angle Spinning Without Sidebands", S.L. Gann, J.H. Baltisberger and A. Pines, Chemical Physics Letters, 210, 405-410 (1993). The figures are given as separate pdf files and originals are available in Adobe Illustrator format if needed.
DAH Paper Figure1 Figure2 Figure3 Figure4

I did work with the Reimer group with at UC Berkeley and this culminated in two papers that I helped with involving the DAS study of ¹⁷O in some perovskite structured systems. The paper reproduced here is "Chemical Structure and Oxygen Dynamics in Ba₂In₂O₅", S.B. Adler, J.A. Reimer, J.H. Baltisberger and U. Werner, Journal of the American Chemical Society,116, 675-681 (1994).
Barium Indium Oxide DAS paper

This experiment consisted of some short (1-2 day) MAS experiments followed by a mammoth 40 day DAS experiment at 11.7T on the SiO₂ polymorph coesite. The sample was prepared by J. Stebbins at Stanford and run at UC Berkeley in late 1993. The results have helped to guide the interpretation of ¹⁷O quadrupolar coupling constants in silicates and are presented in the paper "Solid-State ¹⁷O Magic-Angle and Dynamic-Angle Spinning NMR Study of the SiO2 Polymorph Coesite", P.J. Grandinetti, J.H. Baltisberger, I. Farnan, J.F. Stebbins, U. Werner and A. Pines. J. Phys. Chem.,99, 12341-12348 (1995).
¹⁷O DAS experiments on SiO₂ polymorph Coesite

While working at Stanford over the summer of 1995 setting up MQMAS and DAS experiments with Stebbins we published the paper titled "Triple-Quantum Two-Dimensional ²⁷Al Magic-Angle Spinning Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Study of Aluminosilicate and Aluminate Crystals and Glasses", J.H. Baltisberger, Z. Xu, S.H. Wang and A. Pines. Journal of the American Chemical Society,118, 7209-7214 (1996).
MQMAS Experiments on Aluminosilicate materials

Other papers will eventually be reproduced here in the future.

Research Interests
I study how the physical properties of phosphate based glasses are connected to bond-angle and chain-length distributions found in these glasses. These microscopic features are being examined using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, providing chemical shift tensors which can be converted into structural information using correlations derived from both experiments and ab initio calculations. This is accomplished by utilizing the NMR techniques of magic-angle spinning (MAS) and magic-angle hopping (MAH) to extract chemical shift tensors from both previously studied and new systems within the crystalline and non-crystalline metaphosphate classes. These results will be used to determine microscopic structure which will then be correlated with macroscopic properties relating to both sample composition and preparation. In particular, we would like to look at the effect of composition on bond-angle distributions and examine correlations between thes! e distributions and the ionic cond uctivity in these glasses. These experiments represent new and exciting applications of existing techniques to a fundamental class of materials; we will ultimately apply these to other phosphorus-chalcogenide glasses which exhibit even higher ionic conductivities. This research involves undergraduate research assistants who will work on all aspects of this research, including running NMR experiments and interpreting the results, providing a vital element for their chemical education.