Inorganic Coordination Chemistry for Precursor Development

The PhD project will focus on the development of new main group inorganic and coordination complexes, exploring their properties and evaluating selected examples as precursors for the electrodeposition of the semiconducting materials, including for examples tin selenide, tin telluride, gallium antimonide and indium antimonide. The main focus with be to broaden the available classes of coordination compounds involving these elements with a range of neutral group 15 and group 16 ligands, to establish their structural and spectroscopic properties, and for selected examples, to collaborate with electrochemistry researchers to seek sufficient stability, solubility and suitable redox properties to allow electrodeposition of the targeted materials. In addition to developing skills in synthetic inorganic chemistry, expertise in inert atmosphere techniques will be developed. There will be opportunities to gain hands-on experience in a range of key characterisation techniques, including single crystal X-ray diffraction, multinuclear NMR, IR, Raman and UV-visible spectroscopy, as appropriate.