Leanne Pasquini '07 has received the 2007 Undergraduate Student Award from the New York Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. She will be honored at the NYSAS celebration meeting to be held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 17. A Phi Beta Kappa chemistry major, she was nominated by Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren. He nominated Pasquini for her self-directed project that looked at the Raman spectral features associated with various gemstones. The work was done in collaboration with Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones, Professor of Geosciences Dave Bailey and Professor Elgren. Pasquini presented a poster on the project at the Chicago American Chemical Society meeting in April.
In his nomination letter, Elgren noted: "As a junior physical chemistry student, Leanne became interested in probing the structures of various gem stones. For her physical chemistry laboratory, she designed a self-directed project that would look at the Raman spectral features associated with the gems. She approached me with this project because I have a Raman microscope in my research lab. I quickly trained her on the instrument and the principles of Raman spectroscopy. She borrowed a broad range of gem stones from our geosciences department. I worked with her closely on her first couple of samples to make sure that she was getting off on the right foot.
"As hard as we tried, we could not get a good spectrum from a beautiful 'jewel quality' emerald. We did not observe the typical sharp spectral features characteristic of the lattice vibrations of emerald. Instead, we observed a very broad feature at low energy. After collecting data on other rough native emerald samples, we quickly realized that the 'jewel quality emerald' was nothing more than cut glass. She then went on to characterize rubies (synthetic and natural) and 'diamonds' (real diamonds, cubic zirconium, and cut glass)...(Her poster) is a beautiful systematic study that relates the vibrational features observed to the lattice structures of the various gem stones (and lack of lattice structure in the amorphous cut glass samples). Her poster presentation goes well beyond simply reporting the data and uses the opportunity to highlight an exciting and useful application of Raman spectroscopy."
