Materials: Synthesis and Structure
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Coordinator - Professor Kosmas Prassides
This research grouping is interested in many of the major challenges concerning the preparation, analysis and exploitation of materials. We study materials ranging from molecular structures through coordination polymers and extended oxides to proteins. The materials might be technologically important for their electronic, magnetic, catalytic, structural, optical, sensing, superconducting or medicinal properties.
A key theme of much of the work is in relating atomic-scale structure to properties through extensive use of state of the art analytical techniques such as single crystal and powder X-ray and neutron diffraction at both ambient and elevated pressures, solid-state NMR, physical properties measurements and computation. A hallmark of much of this work is pushing these techniques to their limits both in terms of the experiments themselves and the information that can be derived from them, and in combining information from different sources to build up an overall understanding of how function relates to structure.
We have state-of-the art facilities within Durham for synthesis and characterisation and have extensive collaborations with Universities and central facilities around the world. We interact closely with a number of research centres within Durham such as XRDur.
Examples of current research themes (please follow links to individual web sites for details) include:
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Electronic and magnetic properties of highly correlated systems and superconductivty (Prassides, Evans)
- Functional and responsive materials (Evans J, Evans I, Howard, Greenwell, Hodgkinson, Steed)
- Supramolecular materials, gels, anion binding (Steed)
- Pharmaceutical materials (Hodgkinson, Evans, Steed)
- Low dimensional, low symmetry and low crystallinity materials (Steed, Greenwell)
- Pushing the limits of diffraction methods: from chemical crystallography to macromolecular complexes (Howard, Pohl, Evans, Sparkes)
- Development of methodology and applications of solid-state NMR (Hodgkinson)
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