2024 Academia Sinica Open House

Our group uses a wide range of synthetic methods to grow samples of the materials we study. Conventional solid state methods (shake-and-bake) and flux crystal growth are ideally suited to exploratory synthesis in the pursuit of exciting new materials. The optical floating zone image furnace is a powerful tool that allows us to grow pristine large single crystals. High pressure methods allow us to capture metastable phases that cannot be grown under ambient pressure conditions, an excellent route to finding new structural phases with the potential for exotic new properties. By using this diverse set of synthetic techniques, we are able to explore the periodic table in an unconstrained way, applying the most favorable method for the material we seek to grow.