Exploratory synthesis of extended covalent pnictide frameworks

Abstract

Pnictogens (phosphorus and arsenic in particular) are very flexible with respect to their bonding capabilities, forming binary compounds with a majority of the periodic table, and exhibiting a variety of bonding coordination. Consequently, pnictogen-based materials exhibit the full scale of structural dimensionalities from molecular clusters (0D) to isolated chains (1D), layers (2D), and finally, extended 3 dimensional (3D) networks. The variety of structural dimensionalities and physical properties these compounds exhibit encourage the pursuit of new compounds via exploratory synthesis. Utilizing advanced synthetic methods such as flux synthesis to obtain crystal for structural analysis and in-situ powder X-ray diffraction to optimize the synthetic parameters, has unveiled several novel pnictide materials with extended covalent networks. Subsequently, the properties of these materials have been studied both theoretically and experimentally.