“…Although the chemistry of metal xanthates, M(S 2 COR) n , has been investigated for over a century, fueled by applications in analytical chemistry and metal extraction (Rao and Singh, 1971;Magee, 1973;Donaldson, 1976;Rao and Ramakrishna, 2003), there has been something of a renaissance of activity in recent years as these species become the precursor of choice for the deposition of many metal sulfide thin films. Their ease of synthesis, general aerobic stability and, particularly, their facile decomposition via a Chugaev mechanism (Tschugaeff, 1900), thus affording low deposition temperatures, have attracted the interest of scientists as single-source precursors to a variety of sulfide-based materials (Bessergenev et al, 1998;Nair et al, 2002;Koh et al, 2003;Barreca et al, 2005;Han et al, 2007;Clark et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2011;Rath et al, 2013;Kociok-Köhn et al, 2014).…”