No Arabic abstract
We analyze the occurrence of in-plane anisotropy in the electronic, magnetic, elastic and transport properties of more than one thousand 2D materials from the C2DB database. We identify hundreds of anisotropic materials and classify them according to their point group symmetry and degree of anisotropy. A statistical analysis reveals that a lower point group symmetry and a larger amount of different elements in the structure favour all types of anisotropies, which could be relevant for future materials design approaches. Besides, we identify novel compounds, predicted to be easily exfoliable from a parent bulk compound, with anisotropies that largely outscore those of already known 2D materials. Our findings provide a comprehensive reference for future studies of anisotropic response in atomically-thin crystals and point to new previously unexplored materials for the next generation of anisotropic 2D devices.
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.
Anisotropic materials, with orientation-dependent properties, have attracted more and more attention due to their compelling tunable and flexible performance in electronic and optomechanical devices. So far, two-dimensional (2D) black phosphorus shows the largest known anisotropic behavior, which is highly desired for synaptic and neuromorphic devices, multifunctional directional memories, and even polarization-sensitive photodetector, whereas it is unstable at ambient conditions. Recently, 2D few-layered As2S3 with superior chemical stability was successfully exfoliated in experiments. However, the electronic and mechanical properties of monolayer and bilayer As2S3 is still lacking. Here, we report the large anisotropic electronic and mechanical properties of As2S3 systems through first-principles calculations and general angle-dependent Hookes law. Monolayer and bilayer As2S3 exhibit anisotropic factors of Youngs modulus of 3.15 and 3.32, respectively, which are larger than the black phosphorous with experimentally confirmed and an anisotropic factor of 2. This study provides an effective route to flexible orientation-dependent nanoelectronics, nanomechanics, and offers implications in promoting related experimental investigations.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have been a hot research topic in the last decade, due to novel fundamental physics in the reduced dimension and appealing applications. Systematic discovery of functional 2D materials has been the focus of many studies. Here, we present a large dataset of 2D materials, with more than 6,000 monolayer structures, obtained from both top-down and bottom-up discovery procedures. First, we screened all bulk materials in the database of Materials Project for layered structures by a topology-based algorithm, and theoretically exfoliate them into monolayers. Then, we generated new 2D materials by chemical substitution of elements in known 2D materials by others from the same group in the periodic table. The structural, electronic and energetic properties of these 2D materials are consistently calculated, to provide a starting point for further material screening, data mining, data analysis and artificial intelligence applications. We present the details of computational methodology, data record and technical validation of our publicly available data (http://www.2dmatpedia.org/).
The vibrational density of states (VDOS) of nanoclusters and nanocrystalline materials are derived from molecular-dynamics simulations using empirical tight-binding potentials. The results show that the VDOS inside nanoclusters can be understood as that of the corresponding bulk system compressed by the capillary pressure. At the surface of the nanoparticles the VDOS exhibits a strong enhancement at low energies and shows structures similar to that found near flat crystalline surfaces. For the nanocrystalline materials an increased VDOS is found at high and low phonon energies, in agreement with experimental findings. The individual VDOS contributions from the grain centers, grain boundaries, and internal surfaces show that, in the nanocrystalline materials, the VDOS enhancements are mainly caused by the grain-boundary contributions and that surface atoms play only a minor role. Although capillary pressures are also present inside the grains of nanocrystalline materials, their effect on the VDOS is different than in the cluster case which is probably due to the inter-grain coupling of the modes via the grain-boundaries.
A uniaxial strain applied to graphene-like materials moves the Dirac nodes along the boundary of the Brillouin zone. An extreme case is the merging of the Dirac node positions to a single degenerate spectral node which gives rise to a new topological phase. Then isotropic Dirac nodes are replaced by a node with a linear behavior in one and a parabolic behavior in the other direction. This anisotropy influences substantially the optical properties. We propose a method to determine characteristic spectral and transport properties in black phosphorus layers which were recently studied by several groups with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and discuss how the transmittance, the reflectance and the optical absorption of this material can be tuned. In particular, we demonstrate that the transmittance of linearly polarized incident light varies from nearly 0% to almost 100% in the microwave and far-infrared regime.