Zintl Phases and Polar Intermetallics.
The underdeveloped chemistry of intermetallics and their unpredictable phase stabilities offer serious challenges and immense opportunities to solid state chemists. Our synthetic explorations illustrates a virtual gold mine of remarkable stoichiometries, unprecedented structures, and novel chemical bonding exhibited by polar intermetallics and Zintl phases. These include low-dimensional intermetallics and novel intermetallic p-systems.

Hybrid Materials and Nanostructures.
We synthesize new low-dimensional hybrid organic-inorganic materials that exhibit desirable optical and electronic properties. We also develop unique strategies to generate high quality and well-defined nanoscale clusters, chains and thin films. These studies will improve our understanding of the basic and fundamental chemical issues such as organic-inorganic interactions, molecular orientation, structure-property modulation that will allow for the design and fabrication of new functional materials with tunable physical and chemical properties.