Support Staff - Martin Vickers - Materials and Inorganic Chemistry

Contact Details
location: Christopher Ingold Building
tel: +44 (0)20 7679 1004
internal phone: 21004
email martin.vickers@ucl.ac.uk

Research Interests

The clickable picture, above, is of me (after a long day), surrounded by models of polymorphs of TiO₂. From the 1st July '09 I became the Senior Research Officer and Laboratory Manager, Inorganic Chemistry here in the department providing support to the Head of Section, Prof. Ivan Parkin, and support for the department's X-ray instrumentation. Until recently I've worked closely with Dr Jeremy Cockcroft on wide applications of Powder X-Ray Diffraction (PXRD) and the development of PXRD equipment. He currently has a Stoe StadiP capillary geometry system and a Siemens (now Bruker AXS) D500 reflection set up. Along with Jeremy, I have developed the Stoe for high resolution and high/low temperature data collection. We have adapted an Orange Cryostat for liquid helium temperatures and added a Cryojet for more routine liquid nitrogen temperatures.

The Stoe StadiP and Siemens D500 in their natural environment:

StadiP	D500

Although both tools are valued very highly, if one clicks here one can understand why we might favour the transmission (Stoe) machine over the more conventional "flat plate" (Siemens) diffractometer.

Additional to our equipment is a Jeol scanning electron microscope with an ED detector for elemental analysis which has proved very useful for our work.

Click images to see some pretty EM pictures done with this microscope:

let there be light	moon light, even

Current interests include drug polymorphism investigations to establish crystallographic purity and posible structure of a variety of common-use drugs. This includes dynamic temperature diffraction and also overlaps with Prof. Sally Price's group studying this phenomenan from the computational side.

A recent collaboration with Dr. Jawwad Dar's group has lead us into nanopartical studies and the first ever user-data collection from the new powder diffraction beam-line at the Diamond Light Source.

As an analytical tool, powder diffraction necessarily leads to an eclectic mix of topics and materials for study. Past examples include the Roman Sevso Silver, cladding on telephone cables, asbestos removed from buildings, cow shed cleaners, human bone/urinary calculi composition and antient Egyptian bronzes.

I shall include information about the other diffraction sets in the department in due course.

Selected Publications

Refereed Articles

Use of wide-angle X-ray diffraction to measure shape and size of dispersed colloidal particles. S J S Qazi, A R Rennie, J K Cockcroft, M Vickers. J. Colloid Interf. Sci. 338, 2009

Synthesis and characterisation of magnesium substituted calcium phosphate bioceramic nanoparticles made via continuous hydrothermal flow synthesis. A A Chaudhry, J Goodall, M Vickers, J K Cockcroft, I Rehman, J Knowles and J A Darr. J. Mater. Chem. 2008

A detailed study of the variation in lattice parameter and structure with temperature and dilution in yttrium-substituted holmium hexachloro-elpasolite Cs₂NaY_1-xHo_xCl₆. R Sabry-Grant, M Vickers, J K Cockcroft. Zeitschrift für Kristallographie, 222, Is. 07, 356 (2007)

Toward the Computational Design of Diastereomeric Resolving Agents: An Experimental and Computational Study of 1-Phenylethylammonium-2-phenylacetate Derivatives. Karamertzanis P.G., A.T. Hulme, P.R. Anandamanoharan, P. Fernandes, P.W. Cains, M. Vickers, D.A. Tocher, A.J. Florence S.L. Price. J. Phys. Chem. B. Vol 111 (19), 5326 (2007)

Thermal properties of Si₁₃₆: Theoretical and experimental study of the type-II clathrate polymorph of Si. X Tang, J Dong, P Hutchins, O Shebanova, J Gryko, P Barnes, J K Cockroft, M Vickers, P F McMillan. Phys. Rev. B 74, 014109 (2006).

The solvates of o-acetamidobenzamide. S A Barnett, D A Tocher and M Vickers. Cryst. Eng. Comm, 8, 313 (2006).

Hydrothermal crystallisation of doped zirconia: An in situ X-ray diffraction study. F Lupo, J K Cockcroft, P Barnes, P Stukas, M Vickers, C Norman, H Bradshaw. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 6, 1837 (2004).

Web Articles

Drug polymorph investigations (see Experimental Reports). Many of the diffraction patterns in the reports have been submitted to the International Centre for Diffraction Data for inclusion in the Powder Diffraction File.

Teaching

3001 M16 Powder X-ray Diffraction: 3rd year Taught Research Practical.
Link to Applied Chemical Crystallography / Industrial Materials Group web pages

This page last modified 6 November 2008

University College London
Department of Chemistry
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)20 7679 1003
F: +44 (0)20 7679 7463
e: chemistry@ucl.ac.uk