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Project Description:
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This interdisciplinary project will incorporate the disciplines of Chemistry and Materials Science. However the project is specifically housed within the Hope College Department of Chemistry.
In the past, the use of different iron salts as precursors had render different kind of nanostructures when maintaining the rest of the synthetic parameters constant. In particular, we are interested in the use of inorganic complexes, as we can fine tune their structure and properties, and therefore their impact on the nanomaterial structuration. Of particular interest is the effect that nuclearity and ligand coordination of the starting complexes (single metal-atom versus a multi-atom cluster) have in the resulting composition of the nanomaterial. These precursors will be provided by the Hernández-Sánchez group at the University of Pittsburgh, which expertise relies on the synthesis of these molecules. However, a full characterization of these precursors is required. We aim at establishing the relationship between the initial metal complex and the resulting nanomaterial. Hence, having access to single-crystal X-ray diffraction instrumentation at ChemMatCARS will prove fundamental in our structural studies. Once we have the understanding on how the structure of these precursors affect the nanomaterial formation, the use of other metal complexes will be explored to control the structure of diverse kind of MNCs.
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