Modern technologies have changed in astounding ways in the past few decades. These changes have impact on our way of life, often in a way which was unpredictable in the first place. Often, existing technologies were improved and became more sophisticated and complex, such as in the case of computing and communications, sometimes performance could be improved by many orders of magnitude and making the previously impossible into the ordinary.
At the basis of all our sophisticated technologies are the materials - the chemical compounds - whose physical properties make the technologies possible. These are the heroes of our modern age: without them the giant technologies would not work at all.
As technologies evolve toward greater sophistication, and condensed matter physics moves toward greater understanding of complex systems, new materials very often play an important role in the development in new research directions. A goal of the research in our group is to identify the technologies or scientific issues for which new electronic or magnetic materials are needed, and to discover those materials using the methods of synthetic solid state chemistry.