Metal-chalcogenide clusters

The growing interest of chemists and materials scientists in molecular clusters in which transition metal atoms are bridged by chalcogenide atoms is due to many metal-chalcogenide compounds having electrical and ionic conductivities intermediate between those of semiconductors and metallic phases, and to the dependence of these and other physical, chemical and structural properties of metal chalcogenides on their molecular size, which ranges from the small molecular cluster to bulk materials. Our work on the synthesis and characterization of metal chalcogenides includes studies of colloidal nanoparticles with limited size distributions, and the preparation of crystalline aggregates allowing determination of the structures of their component clusters by single-crystal X-ray diffractometry.