2024 New's Items

Systematic Computational Study of Oxide Adsorption Properties for Applications in Photocatalytic CO2 Reduction

Andriuc
Oxana
Martin Siron
Kristin Persson
2024
While the adsorption properties of transition metal catalysts have been widely studied, leading to the discovery of various scaling relations, descriptors of catalytic activity, and well-established computational models, a similar understanding of semiconductor catalysts has not yet been achieved. In this work, we present a high-throughput density functional theory investigation into the adsorption properties of 5 oxides of interest to the photocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction: TiO2 (rutile and anatase), SrTiO3, NaTaO3, and CeO2. Using a systematic approach, we exhaustively identify unique...

High-Capacity, Cooperative CO2 Capture in a Diamine-Appended Metal–Organic Framework through a Combined Chemisorptive and Physisorptive Mechanism

Zhu Z
Tsai H
Parker S. T
Lee J-H
Yabuuchi Y
Jiang HZH
Wang Y
Xiong S
Forse AC
Dinakar B
Huang A
Dun C
Milner PJ
Smith A
Guimarães Martins P
Meihaus KR
Urban JJ
Reimer JA
Neaton JB
Long JR
2024

Diamine-appended Mg2(dobpdc) (dobpdc4– = 4,4′-dioxidobiphenyl-3,3′-dicarboxylate) metal–organic frameworks are promising candidates for carbon capture that exhibit exceptional selectivities and high capacities for CO2. To date, CO2 uptake in these materials has been shown to occur predominantly via a chemisorption mechanism involving CO2 insertion at the amine-appended metal sites, a mechanism that limits the capacity of the material to ∼1 equiv of CO2 per diamine. Herein, we report a new framework, pip2–Mg...

Removal of Chromium and Arsenic from Water Using Polyol-Functionalized Porous Aromatic Frameworks

Uliana AA
Pezoulas ER
Zakaria NI
Johnson AS
Smith A
Lu Y
Shaidu Y
Velasquez EO
Jackson MN
Blum M
Neaton JB
Yano J
Long JR
2024

Chromium and arsenic are two of the most problematic water pollutants due to their high toxicity and prevalence in various water streams. While adsorption and ion-exchange processes have been applied for the efficient removal of numerous toxic contaminants, including heavy metals, from water, these technologies display relatively low overall performances and stabilities for the remediation of chromium and arsenic oxyanions. This work presents the use of polyol-functionalized porous aromatic framework (PAF) adsorbent materials that use chelation, ion-exchange, redox activity, and...

Entropic Effects on Diamine Dynamics and CO2 Capture in Diamine-Appended Mg2(dopbdc) Metal–Organic Frameworks

Shaidu Y
DeSnoo W
Smith A
Taw E
Perkins CL
Neaton JB
Neaton JB
2025

Recent measurements [Xu, J.; J. Phys. Chem. Lett.2019, 10 (22), 7044−7049] have reported temperature-dependent rates of detachment of diamine from Mg sites in diamine-appended Mg2(dobpdc) [dobpdc4– = 4,4′-dihydroxy(1,1′-biphenyl)-3,3′-dicarboxylic] metal–organic frameworks, a process hypothesized to be a precursor for cooperative CO2 adsorption, leading to step-shaped isotherms or isobars. Here, we compute the rate of diamine exchange...

Candidate ferroelectrics via ab initio high-throughput screening of polar materials

Ricci F
Reyes-Lillo SE
Mack SA
Neaton JB
2024

Ferroelectrics are a class of polar and switchable functional materials with diverse applications, from microelectronics to energy conversion. Computational searches for new ferroelectric materials have been constrained by accurate prediction of the polarization and switchability with electric field, properties that, in principle, require a comparison with a nonpolar phase whose atomic-scale unit cell is continuously deformable from the polar ground state. For most polar materials, such a higher-symmetry nonpolar phase does not exist or is unknown. Here, we introduce a general high-...

Clamping Enables Enhanced Electromechanical Responses in Antiferroelectric Thin Films

Pan H
Zhu M
Banyas E
Alaerts L
Acharya M
Zhang H
Kim J
Chen X
Huang X
Xu M
Harris I
Tian Z
Ricci F
Hanrahan B
Spanier JE
Hautier G
LeBeau JM
Neaton JB
Martin LW
2024

Thin-film materials with large electromechanical responses are fundamental enablers of next-generation micro-/nano-electromechanical applications. Conventional electromechanical materials (for example, ferroelectrics and relaxors), however, exhibit severely degraded responses when scaled down to submicrometre-thick films due to substrate constraints (clamping). This limitation is overcome, and substantial electromechanical responses in antiferroelectric thin films are achieved through an unconventional coupling of the field-induced antiferroelectric-to-ferroelectric phase transition...

Nonempirical Prediction of the Length-Dependent Ionization Potential in Molecular Chains

Ohad G
Hartstein M
Gould T
Neaton JB
Kronik L
2024

The ionization potential of molecular chains is well-known to be a tunable nanoscale property that exhibits clear quantum confinement effects. State-of-the-art methods can accurately predict the ionization potential in the small molecule limit and in the solid-state limit, but for intermediate, nanosized systems prediction of the evolution of the electronic structure between the two limits is more difficult. Recently, optimal tuning of range-separated hybrid functionals has emerged as a highly accurate method for predicting ionization potentials. This was first achieved for molecules using...

First-Principles Studies of the Electronic and Optical Properties of Zinc Titanium Nitride: The Role of Cation Disorder

Ke S
Mangum JS
Zakutayev A
Greenaway AL
Neaton JB
2024

Cation disorder is an established feature of heterovalent ternary nitrides, a promising class of semiconductor materials. A recently synthesized wurtzite-family ternary nitride, ZnTiN2, shows potential for durable photoelectrochemical applications with a measured optical absorption onset of 2 eV, which is 1.4 eV lower than previously predicted, a large difference attributed to cation disorder. Here, we use first-principles calculations based on density functional theory to establish the role of cation disorder in the electronic and optical properties of ZnTiN2. We...

Equivariant Neural Networks Utilizing Molecular Clusters for Accurate Molecular Crystal Lattice Energy Predictions

Gupta K
Stulajter MM
Shaidu Y
Neaton JB
de Jong WA
2024

Equivariant neural networks have emerged as prominent models in advancing the construction of interatomic potentials due to their remarkable data efficiency and generalization capabilities for out-of-distribution data. Here, we expand the utility of these networks to the prediction of crystal structures consisting of organic molecules. Traditional methods for computing crystal structure properties, such as plane-wave quantum chemical methods based on density functional theory (DFT), are prohibitively resource-intensive, often necessitating compromises in accuracy and the choice of...

Dark Metastable Conduction Channels near a Metal-Insulator Transition

Devidas TR
Reichanadter JT
Haley SC
Sterenberg M
Moore JE
Neaton JB
Analytis JG
Kalisky B
Maniv E
2024

Materials that transition between metal and insulator, the two main states that distinguish all solids, are fascinating because they underlie many mysteries at the frontier of solid state physics. In 1T-TaS22, the metal-insulator transition is linked to a metastable hidden state arising within a chiral charge density wave (CDW) whose basic nature remains an open question. In this work, we show that pulses of current through these...