A museum-worthy canvas that looks like nothing else can be created with a few different colored paints. They draw upon inspiration, know what's been done in the past, and learn design rules after years in the studio.
When inventing new compounds, chemists do the same thing. A new method for discovering and making new materials with more than one element has been developed by researchers.
"We expect that our work will prove very valuable to the chemistry, materials and Condensed Matter communities for synthesizing new and currently unpredictable materials with exotic properties," said Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern.
The invention method grew out of research on unconventional superconductors. One of the elements is not a metal. They can't resist the passage of electricity at different temperatures.
Scientists have made many unconventional superconductors over the last 50 years. Improved power generation, energy transmission and high-speed transportation are just a few of the possibilities for such materials. They have the potential to be incorporated into magnetic resonance systems, quantum computers, and energy efficient microelectronics.
The solution made of two components is the start of the invention method. One is a solvent that works well. It reacts with any additions to the solution. The other isn't as effective. It's there for tuning the reaction to make a new solid. The temperature and the ratio of components are changed. The temperature in this area is 1,300 degrees.
Kanatzidis said that they were not concerned with making known materials better but with discovering materials no one knew about. We can avoid reaction pathways to known materials with this method.
The researchers applied their method to the compounds. Their discovery method yielded 30 new compounds. Some of them have never been seen before.
The team prepared single crystals of some of these new compounds and characterized their structures at UChicago's ChemMatCARS beamline. The structures for the different chemical phases that formed during the reaction process were tracked with the help of beamline 17-BM-B.
Zhou said that chemists have invented and made new materials using only knowledge of the beginning ingredients and final product. The intermediate products that form during a reaction were taken into account.
Key experimental data and theoretical calculations were provided to the project by the Center forNanoscale Materials.
The method can be used to apply almost any solid. It can be used to make a variety of crystal structures. Multiple stacked layers, a single layer an atom thick and chains of molecule that aren't linked are included. Unusual structures are key to the development of next- generation materials that are applicable to not only superconductors, but also microelectronics, batteries, magnets and more.
The study co- authors include Zhou, Kanatzidis and Xu.
There is more information about the discovery of chalcogenides structures and compositions. The DOI is 10.1038/s41586-020-07.
Journal information: Nature
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