Ring and Cage Assemblies for Main Group Elements

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Dr. Robert T. Paine, Chemistry Department, University of New Mexico, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for the study of phosphorus-boron cage and ring molecules. The study will focus on the fundamental bond breaking and making processes of tricoordinate main group atoms. The basic objective of the project is the development of new, general synthetic methods for main group ring and polycyclic compounds and to explore the use of these species as precursors to boron phosphide solid state materials. Specifically, new boron-phosphorus cages with core atom nuclearities of greater than five and analogues that contain one or more heteroatoms will be prepared and acyclic building blocks will be developed as reagents for cage assembly. While boron phosphide (BP) is a semiconductor with potentially valuable electronic properties, it is currently only available as an impure material that displays low electron mobility and that is hard to process. These features have retarded commercial development of BP. In this project molecular cage molecules, which are composed of a three dimensional B-P framework, will be prepared. These compounds, together with closely related molecules that incorporate small amounts of yet a third element into the cage, will be examined as precursors from which BP can be made more easily and cleanly. As small fragments of BP will be preformed in the core of the molecules, precise control of the size of the resulting BP may be possible, leading to the possibility of obtaining very small particles of BP for use as `quantum-confined semiconductors.`