Title: Complex Materials Through Simple Chemistry
Abstract: Materials with complex atomic and magnetic structures are at the core of recent technologies poised to revolutionize data storage and processing. Yet, this complexity makes such materials difficult if not impossible to predict and model. Here, I will show how basic inorganic chemistry concepts can be combined with materials synthesis to understand and control the electronic and magnetic properties of such materials.
First, I will discuss how those tools helped me produce metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with record-high electrical conductivities. In part due to their intrinsic porosities, MOFs are typically electrical insulators – except for a small subset, which, surprisingly, can conduct electricity similarly to graphite. In this part, I will show how synthesis of new materials provided insight into the origin of the high conductivities in these MOFs, and helped produce the most conductive intrinsically porous solids.
Second, I will demonstrate how chemical understanding can enable the discovery of new noncollinear magnets. Such materials, where magnetic moments do not share a common axis, can enable rapid and efficient computer memory – but are typically found only serendipitously. In this part, I will show a chemical design strategy that implements recent advances in the physics of electronic topology. This strategy produced new noncollinear magnets with some of the strongest electrical transport signatures of the magnetic order reported to date.
Bio: B.Sc. in Materials Science (Lomonosov Moscow State University) 2015.
Ph.D. in Chemistry (MIT) 2021 (awarded the MIT Alan Davison Prize for best thesis in Inorganic Chemistry). Advisor: Mircea Dinca. Research focus: electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks.
Currently a postdoc in Leslie Schoop’s lab at Princeton in the Chemistry department. Awarded the Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellowship. Research focus: magnetism and electrical transport in solid-state intermetallic phases.
Host: Danny Fredrickson