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.
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.
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).
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.
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