Functional Inorganic Materials: From Precursors to Applications

International customers, please contact your local Sigma-Aldrich office. For worldwide contact information, please see last page. Material Matters is also available at aldrich.com/matsci. Aldrich brand products are sold through Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC. Purchaser must determine the suitability of the product for its particular use. See product information on the Sigma-Aldrich website at sigma-aldrich.com and/or on the reverse side of invoice or packing slip for additional terms and conditions of sale. All prices are subject to change without notice. Introduction Welcome to the second issue of Material Matters™ for 2012 focusing on Functional Inorganic Materials: From Precursors to Applications. Functional inorganic materials can be broadly defined as materials which can exhibit specific properties critical for end applications. This special class of materials has emerged to play a profound role in modern technologies and find use in numerous applications such as microelectronics, computer memories, coatings, optics, sensors, catalysis, photovoltaics, energy storage and biomedicine. Rapidly changing technologies continue to drive the discovery of new materials. Recent advances in the area of functional materials include the development of porous materials, light-emitting materials, thermoelectric materials, ionic and electronic conducting materials, and nanomaterials. Crucial to these advances is understanding the relationships between composition, structure, and properties of these newly-developed functional materials, along with the dependence of their properties on precursors and processing methods. The preparation of materials in a scalable and continuous manner is another key requirement for the transition of new materials to the market. Soft chemistry or " chimie douce " has shown great success in fabricating functional and nanostructured materials with the possibility to control the reaction pathways during the transformation of the precursor species to the final product. Among the various " soft " chemistry routes, sol-gel based procedures proved to be particularly successful in the preparation of various " hard and soft " functional materials. The current issue of Material Matters™ features articles that highlight the preparation of functional inorganic materials synthesized by sol-gel and related techniques, and their applications. To begin with Prof. reviews the preparation of mesoporous titanium dioxide thin films by hard and soft templating processes and its application in semiconductor photocatalysis. In the second article, Prof. a new type of inorganic-organic hybrid material called melting gels, the effect of the nature of the precursors on the properties of the melting gels and their applications as " low κ " dielectric materials in integrated circuits for metal-oxide semiconductor …