2005 Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry Award Lecture — Host–guest inclusion chemistry of electroactive, mesoporous transition metal oxides oxidation and 1-D confinement in one step and why amorphous is better

Abstract

The flexible oxidation states of mesoporous Nb, Ta, and Ti oxides make them unique amongst porous materials allowing reaction pathways and cascades that are not possible for mesoporous silica or microporous materials such as zeolites. This electronic activity coupled with the 20–30 Å pores and the amorphous wall structure, which provides greater bandwidth (W) and hence an even greater range of redox potentials, leads to a rich variety of host–guest inclusion chemistry, which serves as an unprecedented 1-D analogue to layered 2-D host–guest inclusion reactions studied for decades. In this paper we survey a series of reactions between these mesoporous hosts and a wide variety of organic and organometallic guest species including alkali fullerides, cobaltocene, and other organometallic sandwhich species, and discuss the electronic and magnetic properties of the resulting composites.Key words: mesoporous materials, semiconductors, fullerides, superconductors, oxides, nanomaterials, metallocenes.