9409927 Braddock-Wilking U. of Missouri - St. Louis Dr. Janet Braddock-Wilking, Chemistry Department, University of Missouri - St. Louis, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division with a Research Planning Grant to develop synthetic routes to polyhedral cage compounds of silicon containing peripheral transition metal substituents. First, a series of (trichlorosilyl)metal complexes will be generated by the oxidative addition of trichlorosilane to electron-rich transition metal complexes. These metal-silyl compounds will then be reductively coupled using various reducing agents to afford the metal substituted polyhedral silicon clusters. New silicon nuclear magnetic resonance techniques will be developed to facilitate the characterization of these compounds. Silicon is one of the most useful materials available in modern technology, for example, silicon wafers are central to a large portion of the electronics industry. However, very little attention has been devoted to the design of precursors which would permit very small silicon crystals with well defined sizes or silicon with specific surface properties to be easily obtained. In this research a new class of compounds will be prepared in which a small number of silicon atoms are joined to one another to make "cages" of specific sizes and geometries. Surrounding the silicon cages will be a sheath of another metal. Ultimately, these compounds are envisioned as precursors for small "nanoclusters" of silicon and for thin films of metal-silicides.
