This grant provides support under the Presidential Young Investigator Program. The project involves the application of inorganic chemistry to materials science with a focus on the synthesis and characterization of new solid state materials. Low temperature synthetic methods will be developed and exploited to produce kinetically stable solid state complexes which are inaccessible by other means. Target substances include new layered compounds such as metal sulfides which have interesting electronic and magnetic properties. Another goal of the project is to explore and characterize the effects of novel dopants on conducting polymers. For example, polyacetylene will be doped with heavy metals. Such dopants may change drastically such properties as magnetism, conductivity or charge storage capacity. Conducting polymers and layered metal sulfides will be investigated also as possible electrode materials for storage batteries. An important goal of this research is the development of a material to replace lithium in non-aqueous storage batteries.
