ACS Appl Mater Interfaces
May 2024
The global emphasis on sustainable technologies has become a paramount concern for nations worldwide. Specifically, numerous sustainable methods are being explored as promising alternatives to the well-established vapor-compression technologies in cooling and heating devices. One such avenue gaining traction within the scientific community is the elastocaloric (eC) effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Nanoscrolls are tube-shaped structures formed when a sheet or ribbon of material is rolled into a cylinder, creating a hollow tube with a diameter on the nanoscale, similar to the papyrus. Carbon nanoscrolls have unique properties that make them useful in various applications, such as energy storage, catalysis, and drug delivery. In this study, we employed classical molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the formation and stability of nanoscrolls composed of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) nanoribbons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Recent advances in nanomaterial synthesis and characterization have led to exploring novel 2D materials. The biphenylene network (BPN) is a notable achievement in current fabrication efforts. Numerical studies have indicated the stability of its boron nitride counterpart, known as BN-BPN.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKirigami, a traditional Japanese art of paper cutting, has recently been explored for its elastocaloric effect (ECE) in kirigami-based materials (KMs), where an applied strain induces temperature changes. Importantly, the feasibility of a nanoscale graphene kirigami monolayer was experimentally demonstrated. Here, we investigate the ECE in GK representing the thinnest possible KM to better understand this phenomenon.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCarbon nanotubes individually show excellent mechanical properties, being one of the strongest known materials. However, when assembled into bundles, their strength reduces dramatically. This still limits the understanding of their scalability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMolecules
March 2022
Organic compounds have been employed in developing new green energy solutions with good cost-efficiency compromise, such as photovoltaics. The light-harvesting process in these applications is a crucial feature that still needs improvements. Here, we studied natural dyes to propose an alternative for enhancing the light-harvesting capability of photovoltaics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFingerprints do not repeat, varying from region to region on the same fingerprint and from person to person. Using this morphological exclusivity in the individualization of people is considered one of the most reliable methods of identification worldwide. Many populations have been studied with respect to sex determination from fingerprints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGraphene-based nanofolds (GNFs) are edge-connected 2D stacked monolayers that originate from single-layer graphene. Graphene-based nanoscrolls (GNSs) are nanomaterials with geometry resembling graphene layers rolled up into a spiral (papyrus-like) form. Both GNS and GNF structures induce significant changes in the mechanical and optoelectronic properties of single-layer graphene, aggregating new functionalities in carbon-based applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecently, it was experimentally shown that the performance and thermal stability of the perovskite MAPbI were improved upon the adsorption of a molecular layer of caffeine. In this work, we used a hybrid methodology that combines uncoupled monte carlo (UMC) and density functional theory (DFT) simulations to carry out a detailed and comprehensive study of the adsorption mechanism of a caffeine molecule on the surface of MAPbI. Our results showed that the adsorption distance and energy of a caffeine molecule on the MAPbI surface are 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGraphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are promising quasi-one-dimensional materials with various technological applications. Recently, methods that allowed for the control of GNR's topology have been developed, resulting in connected nanoribbons composed of two distinct armchair GNR families. Here, we employed an extended version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model to study the morphological and electronic properties of these novel GNRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecently, laser-assisted chemical vapor deposition has been used to synthesize a free-standing, continuous, and stable monolayer amorphous carbon (MAC). MAC is a pure carbon structure composed of randomly distributed five, six, seven, and eight atom rings, which is different from that of disordered graphene. More recently, amorphous MAC-based nanotubes (a-CNT) and nanoscrolls (a-CNS) were proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPenta-graphene (PG) is a carbon allotrope that has recently attracted the attention of the materials science community due to its interesting properties for renewable energy applications. Although unstable in its pure form, it has been shown that functionalization may stabilize its structure. A question that arises is whether its outstanding electronic properties could also be further improved using such a procedure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopgraphene (PopG) is a new 2D planar carbon allotrope which is composed of 5-8-5 carbon rings. PopG is intrinsically metallic and possesses excellent thermal and mechanical stability. In this work, we report a detailed study of the thermal effects on the mechanical properties of PopG membranes using fully-atomistic reactive (ReaxFF) molecular dynamics simulations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivated by the success of graphene in flat optoelectronics, several carbon allotropes have recently been proposed. One of these allotropes, graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) with a singular "necklace-like" atomic structure, was recently synthesized through a bottom-up chemical approach. The absorption spectrum exhibited a band gap of 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectronic coupling between adjacent molecules is one of the key parameters determining the charge transfer (CT) rates in bulk heterojunction (BHJ) polymer solar cells (PSCs). We calculate theoretically electronic couplings for exciton dissociation (ED) and charge recombination (CR) processes at local poly(thiophene-co-quinoxaline) (TQ)-PC71BM interfaces. We use eigenstate-based coupling schemes, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGraphene nanoribbons are 2D hexagonal lattices with semiconducting band gaps. Below a critical electric field strength, the charge transport in these materials is governed by the quasiparticle mechanism. The quasiparticles involved in the process, known as polarons and bipolarons, are self-interacting states between the system charges and local lattice distortions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe structural and electronic properties of MoS sheets doped with carbon line domains are theoretically investigated through density functional theory calculations. It is primarily studied how the system's electronic properties change when different domain levels are considered. These changes are also reflected in the geometry of the system, which acquires new properties when compared to the pristine structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGraphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are two-dimensional structures with a rich variety of electronic properties that derive from their semiconducting band gaps. In these materials, charge transport can occur via a hopping process mediated by carriers formed by self-interacting states between the excess charge and local lattice deformations. Here, we use a two-dimensional tight-binding approach to reveal the formation of bipolarons in GNRs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolarons play a crucial role in the charge transport mechanism when it comes to organic molecular crystals. The features of their underlying properties - mostly the ones that directly impact the yield of the net charge mobility - are still not completely understood. Here, a two-dimensional Holstein-Peierls model is employed to numerically describe the stationary polaron properties in organic semiconductors at a molecular scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExcitons play a critical role in light emission when it comes to organic semiconductors. In high exciton concentration regimes, monomolecular and bimolecular routes for exciton recombination can yield different products affecting significantly the material's optical properties. Here, the dynamical decay of excitons is theoretically investigated using a kinetic Monte Carlo approach that addresses singlet exciton diffusion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Kr-CHOH (Krypton-Methanol) system has several technological applications, such as the determination of diffusivity coefficients, their use in the development of detectors and combustion techniques among others. We report an extensive theoretical study concerning the stability of such complex. A mix between molecular dynamics, electronic structure calculations and solution of the nuclear Schrodinger equation lead to investigation of spectroscopic constants, lifetime of the complex and its Quantum Theory Atom in Molecules (QTAIM) properties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn important aspect concerning the performance of armchair graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) as materials for conceiving electronic devices is related to the mobility of charge carriers in these systems. When several polarons are considered in the system, a quasi-particle wave function can be affected by that of its neighbor provided the two are close enough. As the overlap may affect the transport of the carrier, the question concerning how the density of polarons affect its mobility arises.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe recombination dynamics of two oppositely charged bipolarons within a single polymer chain is numerically studied in the scope of a one-dimensional tight-binding model that considers electron-electron and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions. By scanning among values of e-ph coupling and electric field, novel channels for the bipolaron recombination were yielded based on the interplay between these two parameters. The findings point to the formation of a compound species formed from the coupling between a bipolaron and an exciton.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe dynamical properties of polarons in organic molecular crystals are numerically studied in the framework of an one-dimensional Holstein-Peierls approach that includes lattice relaxation. Particularly, the present study is aimed at designing a tight-binding Hamiltonian that can address the charge transport mechanism in model oligoacene stacks. Our findings show that the definition of a particular oligoacene system depends strictly on the employed set of parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present an extensive study of the optical properties of Myrcia sylvatica essential oil with the goal of investigating the suitability of its material system for uses in organic photovoltaics. The methods of extraction, experimental analysis, and theoretical modeling are described in detail. The precise composition of the oil in our samples is determined via gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and X-ray scattering techniques.
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