The archetypal silica- and aluminosilicate-based zeolite-type materials are renowned for wide-ranging applications in heterogeneous catalysis, gas-separation and ion-exchange. Their compositional space can be expanded to include nanoporous metal chalcogenides, exemplified by germanium and tin sulfides and selenides. By comparison with the properties of bulk metal dichalcogenides and their 2D de...

A number of new precipitate-based electrodes based for example on mixtures of metal chalcogenides, as well as enzyme electrodes and coated wire electrodes, are described. Their analytical application in the widest sense is reviewed for anions and cations.

Thermoelectric materials that are efficient well above ambient temperature are needed to convert waste-heat into electricity. Many thermoelectric oxides were investigated for this purpose, but their power factor (PF) values were too small (∼10-4 W m-1 K-2) to yield a satisfactory figure of merit zT. Changing the anions from O2- to S2- and then to Se2- is a way to increase the covalency. In this...

Understanding the lattice dynamics and low thermal conductivities of IV-VI, V2-VI3 and V materials is critical to the development of better thermoelectric and phase-change materials. Here we provide a link between chemical bonding and low thermal conductivity. Our first-principles calculations reveal that long-ranged interaction along the 〈100〉 direction of the rocksalt structure exist in lead ...

We make a brief review on the effect of silver photodiffusion in Ge-chalcogenide glasses and report some of our recent results in this aspect. Using Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis we demonstrate that the hosting backbone undergoes depletion in chalcogen due to the specific conditions of photodiffusion and the diffusion products are silver chalcogenides. While in the Ge–Se sys...

I will describe some of our efforts to describe the electronic structure of two-dimensional materials (including graphene and the transition metal chalcogenides) using localized atomic orbitals, going from a purely first-principles perspective, where localized orbitals are used as a basis set for Density Functional Theory calculations with favorable scaling (compared to standard plane wave calc...

Layer-structured two-dimensional nanomaterials are a family of materials with strong covalent bonding within layers and weak van der Waals interaction between layers, whose vertical thickness can be thinned down to few nanometer and even single atomic layer. Bismuth chalcogenides are examples of such two-dimensional materials. Here, we present our discovery of significant enhancement of light t...