The demand for new technological materials has led to renewed interest in the synthesis and physical characterization of solid state compounds. Professor Badding's group uses pressure to explore novel solid state and molecular chemistry. Many solids synthesized at high pressure can be quenched to ambient conditions, where they may be thermodynamically metastable, yet remain indefinitely kinetically stable. Such routes to metastable solids have attracted much attention, because many of the most important and useful materials are metastable.
High pressure is thus valuable for the synthesis of novel or technologically useful solids.
Pressure also allows precise tuning of a fundamental parameter, interatomic distance, which controls the electronic structure and virtually all the interatomic interactions that determine materials properties. With pressure tuning properties can often be more rapidly and cleanly optimized than with chemical tuning, which necessitates the synthesis of a large number of different materials and can induce disorder, phase separation and other undesirable effects. Pressure tuning can therefore be an important tool in the search for new solid state materials with technologically useful properties, such as thermolectric materials, superconductors, magnetoresistive materials and intermetallic structural materials. Demonstration of the existence of materials that exhibit improved properties at high pressure can provide insight into the structural and electronic parameters necessary for such improved properties in order to guide the search for such behavior at atmospheric pressure. We combine pressure tuning studies with traditional chemical approaches to the search for novel materials.