Inorganic Materials and Catalysis

This group develops Boron Cluster Compounds and studies their structural and electronic implications. Boron clusters have a chemistry that could be as large as carbon chemistry. However, they are largely overlooked. They are considered structurally and electronically complicated, rare, unstable and expensive. This biased vision is widely extended, and prevents to tackle many urgent problems of our society and natural medium. The advent of nanotechnology with all that it represents: tiny amounts, small sizes, quantum prevalence, self-assembling, monolayers, open a gate and possible a brilliant future to borane, heteroborane and metallacarborane clusters. Thus, this group aims at developing chemistry methods to produce adequate substitutions on boron clusters to generate the most satisfactory molecules for application in materials science, medicine or energy and other fields in which boron clusters can contribute differently and complementarily to the conventional organic molecules.