Hemamala Karunadasa

My group is invested in gaining synthetic control over extended ionic solids for both improving technologically important materials as well as for designing fundamentally new materials with unprecedented properties. We aim to bring the synthetic design rules common to molecular chemistry to more extended structures by understanding the physical and electronic effects of changes to composition, connectivity, and dimensionality. I will share our current understanding of members of the halide perovskite family, whose technologically relevant properties are highly amenable to synthetic design. I will also introduce new architectures that allow us to mix dimensionality, increase the complexity of the metal composition, and introduce redox active molecules as charge reservoirs for the inorganic framework. We recently reported a synthetic strategy for the self-assembly of layered perovskite–non-perovskite heterostructures into single crystals in solution, using organic groups as structure-directing agents. I will present various layered heterostructures that form as an interleaving of perovskite slabs with a different inorganic lattice and describe the electronic and optical phenomena that occur at the interfaces.