Professor Turnbull served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ in 1995, and as a visiting professor at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain in 2001-2002.

Our research lies in the preparation of new materials and is focused in two areas.

Molecular Magnetism
Over the last two decades, a new field of research has emerged called molecular magnetism. The guiding principle is to use our understanding of structure, bonding and geometry to control the bulk magnetic properties of a material at the molecular level. This is highly interdisciplinary work and involves teams of collaborating organic and inorganic chemists, theoreticians and condensed matter physicists (our group works in collaboration with that of Prof. Christopher Landee in the Physics Dept. as well as several groups around the world, including Spain, Germany, Great Britain and New Zealand).

Low-dimensional Antiferromagnets
The copper oxide-based high temperature superconductors have introduced a new era to the field of conducting materials, but the mechanism of their superconductivity is still not well understood. One theory suggests that the mechanism of the electrical superconductivity is related to the mechanism of magnetic super-exchange in these compounds. We are working to prepare structurally related complexes which have more moderate ordering tempertures as models for these systems and others where the magnetic interactions are not principally propagated in 3-dimensions. Of special interests are those materials where the magnetic interactions are not strictly one- or two-dimensional in nature, but whose topology may be described as inter-dimensional, such as ladders, honeycombs and rectangles. We have recently succeeded in preparing a large family of the best examples of magnetic ladders known (at right) and experiments are in progress to determine their properties and whether doping the systems will generate superconducting materials as predicted by theory.