Abstract: Conventional synthesis of solid-state materials typically requires high temperatures above 600 °C and long heating times, from days to weeks, to enable atomic diffusion and formation of the thermodynamically stable phase. Although many important materials have been discovered under these conditions, some combinations of atomic structure and elemental composition that could produce desirable electronic and magnetic properties remain inaccessible by conventional solid-state synthesis. I present progress in two alternative synthetic pathways aimed at accessing these structures and properties: (1) the use of single-source precursors to pre-form metal-metal bonds and trap metastable intermetallics with potential quantum properties and (2) the formation of Au-based hybrid inorganic-organic materials.

Speaker bio: Kelly Powderly is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, where she joined the faculty in 2024. Her research seeks to develop and utilize new synthetic pathways to discover extended solids with magnetic, electronic, and non-trivial topological properties of interest in quantum information science, and to explore new fundamental bonding in materials. Kelly earned her bachelor degree at Northwestern University. She completed her PhD in Chemistry and Materials with Professor Robert J Cava at Princeton University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, where she discovered magnetic inorganic solids with properties ranging from ferrimagnetism to quasi-1D antiferromagnetism. She completed her postdoctoral work with Professor Catherine Murphy at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she was awarded a Beckman-Brown Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.