-Ms.Sc. (1994) with Honours in Chemical Physics at The University of Milan.
- PhD (1999): University of Milan with a thesis on Electron Density Studies and Low Temperature Crystallography of Organometallic Compounds (supervisor: Prof. A. Sironi).
- Habilitation (2009): habilitation in Chemical Crystallography, University of Bern, defending a thesis on Structural Investigations on Soft Bonds.
After the first period of scientific career at Milan University Piero went for a postdoc and worked at the University of Aarhus under supervision of Prof. Fin Kreb Larsen. Next Piero worked as researcher and got permanent positions as aggregate professor at University of Milan. Then Piero moved to the University of Bern in Switzerland where he got in 2009 permanent position as associate professor and the group leader of the Chemical Crystallography Research Group at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
In 2018 Pero returned back to Italy becoming Associate Professor (permanent position) of Principles of Chemistry for Technologies, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano and since 2020 he has been associated researcher at the Center for Nano Science and technology at the Italian Institute of Technology,
Piero is couathor of XD a computer package for multipole refinement and also Polaber a program to compute distributed atomic polarizabilities.
Piero published more than 150 interesting papers and he has been the editor of Modern Charge Density Analysis and Quantum Crystallography, and delivered more than 70 lectures at different conferences.
He has been a successful mentor of more than 20 PhD students and young researchers .
Lecture 1: Piero Macchi
Quantum Crystallography at extreme conditions: necessities and pitfalls
Mail: piero.macchi@polimi.it
The crystal structure is not enough to unveil the nature of a material. This is always true, but even more important when matter is compressed and an unknown new phase appears. Finding atoms close to one other has a meaning at ambient conditions but quite a different one at high pressure where they are not necessarily bound. This becomes cogent when intra-crystal, pressure induced chemical reactions occur or when new materials properties emerges.
For the above purposes, quantum crystallography may provide a unique toolbox to analyze chemical bonding and correlate unprecedented electron distribution with unexpected materials properties. The analysis of the charge density as well as of the crystal wavefunction is one of the most important steps. As we know, the accurate electron density can be mapped with X-ray diffraction, whereas other quantum crystallographic techniques may be employed for the determination of spin states and magnetic interactions.
In this inaugural seminar of the quantum crystallography series of lectures, the state of the art of experimental measurements are summarized, and some results are shown. Necessities and pitfalls will be carefully illustrated as well as some applications, for example the first determination of electron density in a compressed crystal, on the molecule of bis-carbnyl-[14]-annulene (BCA).
An outlook for the applications in materials science and especially magnetism will also be presented.
References
Casati, N.; Kleppe, A.; Jephcoat, A.; Macchi, P. Nature Comm. 2016, 7, 10901.
Putting pressure on aromaticity along with in situ experimental electron density of a molecular crystal
Casati, N., Genoni, A., Meyer, B. Krawczuk, A. Macchi, P. Acta Cryst. 2017, B73, 584–597.
Exploring charge density analysis in crystals at high pressure. Data collection, data analysis and advanced modelling
Scatena, R.; Andrzejewski, M.; Johnson, R.; Macchi, P. J. Mat. Chem. C, 2021, 9, 8051-8056.
Pressure-induced Jahn–Teller switch in the homoleptic hybrid perovskite [(CH3)2NH2]Cu(HCOO)3: orbital reordering by unconventional degrees of freedom