No Arabic abstract
A method was developed to calculate the free energy of 2D materials on substrates and was demonstrated by the system of graphene and {gamma}-graphyne on copper substrate. The method works at least 3 orders faster than state-of-the-art algorithms, and the accuracy was tested by molecular dynamics simulations, showing that the precision for calculations of the internal energy achieves up to 0.03% in a temperature range from 100 to 1300K. As expected, the calculated the free energy of a graphene sheet on Cu (111) or Ni (111) surface in a temperature range up to 3000K is always smaller than the one of a {gamma}-graphyne sheet with the same number of C atoms, which is consistent with the fact that growth of graphene on the substrates is much easier than {gamma}-graphyne.
The C2DB is a highly curated open database organizing a wealth of computed properties for more than 4000 atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials. Here we report on new materials and properties that were added to the database since its first release in 2018. The set of new materials comprise several hundred monolayers exfoliated from experimentally known layered bulk materials, (homo)bilayers in various stacking configurations, native point defects in semiconducting monolayers, and chalcogen/halogen Janus monolayers. The new properties include exfoliation energies, Bader charges, spontaneous polarisations, Born charges, infrared polarisabilities, piezoelectric tensors, band topology invariants, exchange couplings, Raman- and second harmonic generation spectra. We also describe refinements of the employed material classification schemes, upgrades of the computational methodologies used for property evaluations, as well as significant enhancements of the data documentation and provenance. Finally, we explore the performance of Gaussian process-based regression for efficient prediction of mechanical and electronic materials properties. The combination of open access, detailed documentation, and extremely rich materials property data sets make the C2DB a unique resource that will advance the science of atomically thin materials.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are increasingly being used as active components in nanoscale devices. Many interesting properties of 2D materials stem from the reduced and highly non-local electronic screening in two dimensions. While electronic screening within 2D materials has been studied extensively, the question still remains of how 2D substrates screen charge perturbations or electronic excitations adjacent to them. Thickness-dependent dielectric screening properties have recently been studied using electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) experiments. However, it was suggested that some of the thickness-dependent trends were due to extrinsic effects. Similarly, Kelvin probe measurements (KPM) indicate that charge fluctuations are reduced when BN slabs are placed on SiO$_2$, but it is unclear if this effect is due to intrinsic screening from BN. In this work, we use first principles calculations to study the fully non-local dielectric screening properties of 2D material substrates. Our simulations give results in good qualitative agreement with those from EFM experiments, for hexagonal boron nitride (BN), graphene and MoS$_2$, indicating that the experimentally observed thickness-dependent screening effects are intrinsic to the 2D materials. We further investigate explicitly the role of BN in lowering charge potential fluctuations arising from charge impurities on an underlying SiO$_2$ substrate, as observed in the KPM experiments. 2D material substrates can also dramatically change the HOMO-LUMO gaps of adsorbates, especially for small molecules, such as benzene. We propose a reliable and very quick method to predict the HOMO-LUMO gap of small physisorbed molecules on 2D and 3D substrates, using only the band gap of the substrate and the gas phase gap of the molecule.
The growth process of single layer graphene with and without substrate is investigated using ab initio, finite temperature molecular dynamic calculations within density functional theory. An understanding of the epitaxial graphene growth mechanisms in the atomic level is provided by exploring the transient stages which occur at the growing edges of graphene. These stages are formation and collapse of large carbon rings together with the formation and healing of Stone-Wales like pentagon-heptagon defects. The activation barriers for the healing of these growth induced defects on various substrates are calculated using the climbing image nudge elastic band method and compared with that of the Stone-Wales defect. It is found that the healing of pentagon-heptagon defects occurring near the edge in the course of growth is much easier than that of Stone-Wales defect. The role of the substrate in the epitaxial growth and in the healing of defects are also investigated in detail, along with the effects of using carbon dimers as the building blocks of graphene growth.
Motivated by recent advances on local conductance measurement techniques at the nanoscale, timely questions are being raised about what possible information can be extracted from a disordered material by selectively interrogating its transport properties. Here we demonstrate how an inversion technique originally developed to identify the number of scatterers in a quantum device can be adapted to a multi-terminal setup in order to provide detailed information about the spatial distribution of impurities on the surface of a 2D material. The methodology input are conductance readings (for instance, as a function of the chemical potential) between different electrode pairs, the output being the spatially resolved impurity density. We show that the obtained spatial resolution depends not only on the number of conductance measurements but also on the electrode dimensions. Furthermore, when implemented with electrodes in a grid-like geometry, this inversion procedure resembles a Sudoku puzzle in which the compositions of different sectors of a device are found by imposing that they must add up to specific constrained values established for the grid rows and columns. We argue that this technique may be used with other quantities besides the conductance, paving the way to alternative new ways of extracting information from a disordered material through the selective probing of local quantities.
Low-resistivity metal-semiconductor (M-S) contact is one of the urgent challenges in the research of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Here, we report a chloride molecular doping technique which greatly reduces the contact resistance (Rc) in the few-layer WS2 and MoS2. After doping, the Rc of WS2 and MoS2 have been decreased to 0.7 kohm*um and 0.5 kohm*um, respectively. The significant reduction of the Rc is attributed to the achieved high electron doping density thus significant reduction of Schottky barrier width. As a proof-ofconcept, high-performance few-layer WS2 field-effect transistors (FETs) are demonstrated, exhibiting a high drain current of 380 uA/um, an on/off ratio of 4*106, and a peak field-effect mobility of 60 cm2/V*s. This doping technique provides a highly viable route to diminish the Rc in TMDs, paving the way for high-performance 2D nano-electronic devices.