About the author: Jeremy Espano, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Materials Science under the supervision of Prof. Janet Macdonald in the Department of Chemistry.
In their recent work published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Macdonald lab used a library of thioureas to study the effect of decomposition kinetics on phase determination, quantified the phase mixtures using powder X-ray diffraction. Their results found that the bottom-up synthesis of crystalline structures in solids can be predicted by considering the anion stacking and thermodynamic relationships between the phases. In their work, they can map out these relationships and rationally target the synthesis of 6 of the 8 iron sulfides. The paper provides a new way to think about bottom-up synthesis and phase determination, which will contribute to the further development of next generation crystalline materials.