"Synthetic Approaches to Colloidal Nanomaterials of Emerging Semiconductor Materials"
Abstract: The development of new materials for the generation, storage, and efficient usage of clean energy is likely one of the most critical challenges facing materials chemistry today. This includes the development of inorganic semiconductor materials that may have applications in photovoltaics, LEDs, or other optoelectronic devices. Advances in computational methods have made it possible for scientists to predict an array of promising materials, but in many cases synthetic methods to prepare these compounds have been elusive. A major objective of our work is to develop new synthetic approaches based on solution-phase molecular precursors to access emerging and predicted semiconductor materials as colloidal nanocrystals, narrowing the gap between prediction and experimental realization. In particular, this talk will focus on our efforts to prepare colloidal nanomaterials of the ternary materials BaTiS3 and BaZrS3 and our investigations into the properties of the resulting materials. I will discuss structural and optical aspects of their properties and how they can be tuned through colloidal synthesis and alloying, as well as the insights we have gained into the challenges of early transition metal chalcogenide synthesis in general.