Great little video of a guy synthesizing YBCO in a relatively simple home lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU.
There's the shake-and-bake method, or solid state synthesis, and a pyrophoric process shown in the video.
Another great video from Nile Red on the pyrolytic method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS7gyZJg5nc&vl=en
We can follow the method following the same paper he used:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/21/1/036
Barium Nitrate
Copper Nitrate
Yttrium nitrate (hard to find), replaced with Yttrium oxide and nitric acid
Citric acid, used as fuel?
Nitrates are used because they are very soluble and because they are oxidizers and we want an exothermic reaction.
Looking at Northwestern's facilities and resources, it looks great. There do seem to be fees associated with using equipment, and variable based on NU user or not. Not sure if alumni qualifies. Don't think it does.
https://imserc.northwestern.edu/
The Northwestern University (NU) Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center (IMSERC) was established to educate NU students and researchers to be scientific leaders, support world-class research, and provide access to and education for students on the use of a variety of analytical instrumentation and methodologies. IMSERC mission is to support research throughout all of Northwestern and beyond in the areas of (but not limited to) molecular characterization, drug discovery, materials science, environmental research, translational medical research, nanotechnology, chemical biology, catalysis, pharmacokinetics, clinical research, and molecular imaging. To accomplish this, IMSERC is a "one-stop-shop", open-access facility that provides and maintains a suite of state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation.
They also have dedicated equipment for crystallography, perhaps more relevant than the MatCl lab. They've got more advanced XRD methods, more extreme cryo and heating chambers, etc.
https://imserc.northwestern.edu/techniques-crystallography.html
The Materials Characterization and Imaging Facility (MatCI) is a core facility at Northwestern University which is part of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).
XRD lab: https://www.xray.facilities.northwestern.edu/
Alternatively, there are potentially some research groups we could join that would give us access to the lab and resources we're looking for.
You can find some of these groups here: https://chemistry.northwestern.edu/research/areas/materials-nanoscience.html
There is the Kanatzidis group specializing in solid-state inorganic chemistry. Research encompasses a wide range of areas, including exploratory synthesis in chalcogenides and multianionic materials, thermoelectric applications, hard radiation detectors, and the discovery of hybrid perovskite materials for solar cells.
While it's not our computational focus, solar cells and thermoelectric would be an awesome next material to work on.
https://chemgroups.northwestern.edu/kanatzidis/index.html
Their objective is to advance and broaden the "exploratory synthesis" and "synthesis science loop" to bolster materials design, discovery, and synthetic methodology. Sounds like what we're looking for too!
Their lab looks like it has just about everything we could ever want and need to synthesis. Check out this lab walkthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD_SORp66Pk.
This group doesn't seem to have much of a computational emphasis, compared to some of the others though.
Other groups:
Ted Sargent interested in CO2 capture with more of a computational focus
William Dichtel interested in water purification, energy storage, polymers that are tough yet repairable, the detection of explosives
Bryan Hunter interested in sustainability and catalysis, making molecules and materials designed to generate fuels and materials using less energy than traditional processes
thanks for sharing this!
The video you shared was a great watch too!
XRD: cheapest and most concrete. The Jerome B. Cohen X-Ray Diffraction Facility (the MRSEC XRD core) publishes FY2026 external rates: powder XRD on the Rigaku Ultima IV is $45/hr external ($30/hr external academic), $60/hr with a high-temperature stage, one-hour minimum. Training and technician time is $50 per 15 min ($200/hr), so expect a one-time training hit of roughly $100-200 before you're self-service. Non-NU users are limited to weekdays 9am-4pm and book through NUcore. A phase-ID scan is maybe 1-2 hours of instrument time, so after training you're at roughly $45-90 per sample, which undercuts most commercial labs (MSE Supplies starts at $53.95/sample; European full-service runs $190-570).
IMSERC also takes external users, no contract needed for small jobs. Per their fees page: powder diffraction self-service is $22.52/hr external academic ($100/hr commercial), staff-collected is ~$14/hr instrument time plus $171/hr staff time, single-crystal full collection $161.80/sample external academic. They accept credit cards; you set up an external NUcore account and go. Contracts only kick in for companies. No SEM here — it's XRD, microED, NMR, mass spec, XRF.
The synthesis side is the open question. The chemicals are nearly free: a published teaching protocol (J. Chem. Educ. 2008) makes one YBCO pellet from 0.45 g Y₂O₃, 1.58 g BaCO₃, 0.95 g CuO, calcined at 930 °C for 10 h in air, and states the reagents cost under $1 per pellet. Catalog Y₂O₃ (~$160-245 per 100 g) is the only real reagent expense. What you actually need is furnace time: MatCI has box and tube furnaces up to 1700 °C, and they do allow external users, but they publish no external rates — it's email-a-quote only ([email protected]). The realistic alternative is buying a programmable 1200 °C muffle furnace for a few hundred dollars and doing the firing at home, then only paying NU for characterization. A press and die for pelletizing is the other small purchase.
SEM lives in NUANCE, which is open to external researchers in principle, but their 2025-26 external rate PDFs didn't resolve to text, so I couldn't verify numbers. For calibration, UChicago's comparable MRSEC SEM runs $37-114/hr external plus a $292/quarter access fee and $112/hr training, so expect NU to be in that band. Email [email protected] for the real number.
Realistic budget for a first candidate, doing it yourself:
Reagents for a multi-batch campaign: ~$300-450 (dominated by Y₂O₃)
Muffle furnace + press/die + crucibles (if not renting furnace time): a few hundred dollars
XRD at Cohen: ~$300-500 first sample including training, then ~$45-135 each after
SEM, if you want morphology/EDS: probably $150-400 all-in based on UChicago's rates
So roughly $1,000-1,500 buys you a full first campaign — synthesize, fire, phase-check by XRD — with everything after the first sample much cheaper. The pure-rental version (furnaces at MatCI + staff-run XRD at IMSERC) probably lands in the same place but I couldn't verify the furnace rate.
The one thing no published page answers: whether NU will enroll a solo unaffiliated individual at all. The MRSEC external-access path requires a Volunteer and Visitor Lab Use Agreement that's written for institutional visitors, and each facility defers the first contact to a manager. The rate sheets also distinguish "external academic" from plain "external" (industry), and where an individual lands is the manager's call — that's the difference between $22/hr and $100/hr at IMSERC. My suggestion: email [email protected] (Cohen XRD) and [email protected] first with a one-paragraph description of what you want to run. Those two get you phase identification, which is the first real gate on any synthesized candidate anyway. If the individual path stalls, commercial per-sample XRD at ~$54-150/sample keeps the project moving while you keep trying the research groups.