The demand for low cost, unconventional electronics requires new materials with unique characteristics that the traditionally used silicon-based technologies cannot provide. Metal oxide semiconductors, such has amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-IGZO), have made impressive strides as alternatives to amorphous silicon for electronics applications. However, to achieve the full potential...
Two-dimensional (2D) hybrid halide perovskites have been the response to their exciting but woefully unstable 3D counterparts. These 2D perovskites have been shown to have respectable stabilities as photovoltaic absorbers, yet they lag behind the 3D perovskites in terms of efficiency. With the need to catch up to the efficiencies...
Metallic conductivity and broken inversion symmetry were long thought to be contraindicated properties, under the assumption that long-range Coulombic interactions (screened by free charge carriers) were necessary for coordinated polar displacements. Within the past decade, the discovery of polar metals has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between metallicity and...
This thesis describes the synthesis and photophysical characterization of low-dimensionalmaterials—including thin-film semiconductors, colloidal quantum dots, and molecules—with the
broader motivation of integrating them into mixed-dimensional heterostructures with novel
responses to external stimuli. Due to their high surface area to volume ratio and incomplete
dielectric screening, mixed-dimensional heterostructures have high sensitivity...
Nanoparticle synthesis is capable of producing particles with any combination of structure, chemistry, size, shape, and surface. All of the different combinations of these physical properties can produce nanoparticles with almost countless materials properties suited for many applications. Given this interest in using nanoparticles in so many different fields, including...
One of the central challenges in solid-state chemistry is synthetic control over structure. Owing to limited reactivity of Pb with transition metals at ambient pressure and high temperature as well as the variety of properties that emerge from the few known binary transition-metal–Pb compounds, this research focuses on accessing and...
Mixed-dimensional heterojunctions between two-dimensional (2D) materials and organic semiconductors is a rapidly growing field. This is motivated by the promise of leveraging the extraordinary properties of 2D materials with the synthetic tunability and reconfigurability of organic electronics, allowing the realization of new physics or devices that are not possible in...
The idea that structure determines the properties of a material is a powerful concept in chemistry and in all fields in which chemistry is important, including engineering, medicine, and materials science. My research aims to better understand the structure-property relationships of a class of materials known as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs)....
Continuous and coordinated materials discovery efforts have amassed a wealth of knowledge concerning many general classes of materials. The number of known phases of all structure-types, however, is far less than number of possible materials dictated by the elements on the periodic table. Recently, with improved computational abilities and well-developed...
Electrochemical cell devices are increasingly being sought for energy conversion and storage applications due to their high efficiencies and their potential for operating free of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Solid Acid Electrochemical Cells (SAECs), which most commonly employ CsH2PO4 (CDP) as the electrolyte component, are uniquely suited to meet the...