Room-Temperature Liquid Semiconductors

This project aims to investigate a new type of materials: Liquid semiconductors at room temperature.

Today, semiconductors are typically pure, defect-free, crystalline materials in the core of most of our electronic devices. These characteristics in fact work as restrictions to the available compositional and structural space.

If instead using liquid semiconducting materials, neither composition nor long-range structure will be critical for the function. Most knowledge emerge from high-temperature molten semiconductors, such as pure Si and Se.

Such systems tell us that a molten semiconductor need not be a liquid semiconductor; liquid Si is a metal and molten Se a lousy semiconductor. The systems are quite insensitive to defects and impurities.

The theoretical understanding is poor because knowledge of non-local structure is lacking.In this projcet we aim to utilize designed ionic liquids to dissolve semiconducting materials to transform this property from the parent solid to liquid systems operating at room temperature. Our main work horse will be sulfonium iodide ionic liquids, from which we have vast experience.

We aim to start with two different projects: iodide/polyiodide liquids dissolving semiconductor systems like 1, Se and Te; 2, PbI2 and other metal iodides.

The structure/property relationship will be elucidated using a combination of experimental structural characterisation and theoretical modelling. The resulting liquid materials will be applied in photovoltaics.