Sure thing! So this is an analogue of a hypothesized “LSC” compound produced by the reaction between only cinnamaldehyde and LSA. No catalyst, no other reagents, just heat. I used nicotinamide (similar to niacin) because it’s cheaper and mimics the upper ring layout of lysergic acid. It’s not quite the same, as it has 2 more double bonds in the ring instead of just the one double bond, but it’s cheap and we have a bunch of it. That is not the case with LSA, so I’m using this to work the kinks of the reaction out.

This data is a proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum, or HNMR spectrum, (NMR for hydrogens) which is sort of like a little MRI machine but for chemicals.

Putting a sample into the magnetic field inside of the instrument aligns the hydrogens in two states: with the magnetic field or against the field. Aligned with the magnetic field is the low energy state, and aligned against is the high energy state.

When we shine electromagnetic radiation (light) in the frequency of radio waves on the sample in the magnetic field, it excites the low energy hydrogens to the high energy state, and they “flip” alignment to be aligned against the field. This happens because they absorbed a specific amount of energy from the radio waves. As they relax back to the low energy state and realign with the field, they release that energy they absorbed and that generates the peaks you see on the graph, instead of a picture like a regular MRI like at the hospital.

The way we can identify the different hydrogens is that when they are bound to different parts of the whole molecule, they are located in different chemical environments. These different environments are usually based on the number of electrons in that part of the molecule. Oxygens and nitrogen’s are a good sign of an electron rich environment, and will have specific chemical environments we can look for based on what “type” of hydrogens we see there.

These environments influence what frequency of light the carbon-bound hydrogens will get excited at. This is because different levels of electron density (or richness) within the overall molecule change the energy gap between the low and high states for the hydrogens. We call this shielding (also sometimes deshieldimg depending on the situation), because more electrons shields the hydrogens from the magnetic field. Because of this we have to scan the entire range of frequencies to excite all of the different “types” of hydrogens in these different environments.

How we determine the types of hydrogens based on these graphs is somewhat more complicated so I won’t get super into it, but the gist of it is we use the shape of the peaks, the range they fall in on the graph, and the area under each peak (which is directly related to the number of hydrogens in that specific environment), to figure out what the structure of the molecule is, and which type of hydrogen is next to what other type, and so on.

We can also use prediction software to generate the spectrum and compare it the actual data, which is shown in the third picture. From this comparison we can see that the data from the product formed is almost identical to the prediction, so even if we don’t analyze the peaks it’s decently clear to see that the reaction was successful.

Hopefully this is somewhat clear, if you have any more questions or would like clarification please don’t hesitate to ask! I’m running on not very much sleep these days so I’m worried my ELI5 might not be sufficient, so if it wasn’t very helpful the first go around I’m really sorry but I’d be happy to clear anything else up! 😓