Amide-Templated lodoplumbates: Extending Lead-Iodide Based Hybrid Semiconductors

Lead iodide organic hybrids (iodoplumbates) have emerged as a class of materials with promising electronic and optical properties, and potential applications in photo-voltaics and electronic devices. Hybrid iodoplumbates are composed of organic cations and lead iodide anions that exhibit diverse morphologies which determine the optical and electronic properties of the crystal. However, the diversity of the iodoplumbates is limited by the types of organic cations amenable for integration into the structure. Amides represent one of the largest groups of organic molecules, yet no examples of iodoplumbates based on protonated amide cations have been demonstrated so far. In this work, we show that it is possible to consistently grow iodoplumbates from amides following two distinct pathways. The first pathway involves growing iodoplumbates using amidium (protonated amides) as the organic cation in the crystal, which occurs for tertiary amides and urea. The second pathway involves growing iodoplumbates from primary and secondary amides, resulting in crystals containing the ammonium hydrolysis product of the amide. This path also leads to an interesting case of ring opening crystallization. The lead iodide one-dimensional chain motif composes most of the resulting structures. The large number of available amide molecules suggests that this method considerably expands the range of possible iodoplumbate structures.