NZ chemists successfully test new way to knit materials together on the tiniest of scales

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-08-04 10:26

New Zealand

PHOTO: Shane Telfer

NZ researchers report in Nature Chemistry a new way of knitting together materials on the tiniest of scales to give rise to interesting properties. For the last 20 years or so, chemists have been working with a new kind of material that brings metals and organic molecules together. However, this new hybrid class of materials has so far only been studied when all molecules are latticed together in the same way. NZ researchers developed a method to test for the first time what would happen if these hybrid materials had two separate lattice patterns intertwining with each other, and found the two different lattices worked together in a complementary way that built on both of their strengths. The authors say this opens up more opportunities to study how these metal-organic hybrid materials might be able to support gas storage, conductivity, energy transfer and other phenomena.

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Research Springer Nature, Web page

Journal/
conference: Nature Chemistry

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: MacDiarmid Institute

Funder: This research was undertaken in part using the MX2 beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, part of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. We made use of the Australian Cancer Research Foundation detector, partially funded by the New Zealand Group and supported by Massey University. We are grateful to beamline scientists S. Panjikar and J. Price for their expert help. We also thank D. Lun for technical assistance and P. Plieger for guidance on AA spectroscopy. We received no specific funding for this work.

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