Experimental study of the size-dependent photoluminescence emission of CBD-grown PbSe nanocrystals on glass

In this work, we study the size-dependent properties of Photoluminescence (PL) emissions of PbSe Nanocrystals (NCs) grown by Chemical Bath Deposition (CBD) method. In previous studies, PL emissions have been tuned by CBD-grown PbSe, and the growth mechanism was dependent on crystalized substrates such as GaAs. In this research, however, PL emissions are controlled over the midinfrared (MIR) range, through PbSe NCs, which are deposited on glass as an amorphous material. This study proposes an alternative approach to control PL emissions, which provides us with more freedom to fabricate low-cost MIR light sources as crucial components in remote sensing and gas analysis. Moreover, in this study, the advantage of the post-thermal method to control the NCs size, compared to the growth temperature, is shown.

Entropic restrictions control the electric conductance of superprotonic ionic solids

The change in entropic restrictions in a superprotonic transition controls the increase of the ionic conductance in ionic solids.

Ab initio prediction of the polymorph phase diagram for crystalline methanol

Organic crystals frequently adopt multiple distinct polymorphs exhibiting different properties. The ability to predict not only what crystal forms might occur, but under what experimental thermodynamic conditions those polymorphs are stable would be immensely valuable to the pharmaceutical industry and others. Starting only from knowledge of the experimental crystal structures, this study successfully predicts the methanol crystal polymorph phase diagram from first-principles quantum chemistry, mapping out the thermodynamic regions of stability for three polymorphs over the range 0-400 K and 0-6 GPa. The agreement between the predicted and experimental phase diagrams corresponds to predicting the relative polymorph free energies to within ∼0.5 kJ mol-1 accuracy, which is achieved by employing fragment-based second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory and coupled cluster theory plus a quasi-harmonic treatment of the phonons.

Evaluation of General and Tailor Made Force Fields via X-ray Thermal Diffuse Scattering Using Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo Simulations of Crystalline Aspirin

We have performed a comparison of the experimental thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) from crystalline Aspirin (form I) to that calculated from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations based on a variety of general force fields and a tailor-made force field (TMFF). A comparison is also made with Monte Carlo (MC) simulations which use a "harmonic network" approach to describe the intermolecular interactions. These comparisons were based on the hypothesis that TDS could be a useful experimental data in validation of such simulation parameter sets, especially when calculations of dynamical properties (e.g., thermodynamic free energies) from molecular crystals are concerned. Currently such a validation of force field parameters against experimental data is often limited to calculation of specific physical properties, e.g., absolute lattice energies usually at 0 K or heat capacity measurements. TDS harvested from in-house or synchrotron experiments comprises highly detailed structural information representative of the dynamical motions of the crystal lattice. Thus, TDS is a well-suited experimental data-driven means of cross validating theoretical approaches targeted at understanding dynamical properties of crystals. We found from the results of our investigation that the TMFF and COMPASS (from the commercial software "Materials Studio") parameter sets gave the best agreement with experiment. From our homologous MC simulation analysis we are able to show that force constants associated with the molecular torsion angles are likely to be a strong contributing factor for the apparent reason why these aforementioned force fields performed better.

Dispersion analysis of arbitrarily cut orthorhombic crystals

We developed a measurement and evaluation scheme to perform dispersion analysis on arbitrarily cut orthorhombic crystals based on the schemes developed for triclinic and uniaxial crystals. As byproduct of dispersion analysis the orientations of the crystal axes are found. In contrast to the spectra of arbitrarily cut uniaxial crystals, where the fit routine has to separate two independent principal spectra, the spectra of arbitrarily cut orthorhombic crystals are a combination of three independent spectra and the evaluation scheme gets more complex. Dispersion analysis is exemplary performed on two different crystals, which show different spectral features and different levels of difficulties to evaluate. Neodymium gallate (NdGaO₃) has broad overlapping reflections bands while topaz (Al₂SiO₄ [F, OH]₂) has a quite high total number of infrared active bands.

Modeling Polymorphic Molecular Crystals with Electronic Structure Theory

Interest in molecular crystals has grown thanks to their relevance to pharmaceuticals, organic semiconductor materials, foods, and many other applications. Electronic structure methods have become an increasingly important tool for modeling molecular crystals and polymorphism. This article reviews electronic structure techniques used to model molecular crystals, including periodic density functional theory, periodic second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory, fragment-based electronic structure methods, and diffusion Monte Carlo. It also discusses the use of these models for predicting a variety of crystal properties that are relevant to the study of polymorphism, including lattice energies, structures, crystal structure prediction, polymorphism, phase diagrams, vibrational spectroscopies, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Finally, tools for analyzing crystal structures and intermolecular interactions are briefly discussed.

Understanding the structure and electronic properties of molecular crystals under pressure: application of dispersion corrected DFT to oligoacenes

Oligoacenes form a fundamental class of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) which have been extensively explored for use as organic (semi) conductors in the bulk phase and thin films. For this reason it is important to understand their electronic properties in the condensed phase. In this investigation, we use density functional theory with Tkatchenko-Scheffler dispersion correction to explore several crystalline oligoacenes (naphthalene, anthracene, tetracene, and pentacene) under pressures up to 25 GPa in an effort to uncover unique electronic/optical properties. Excellent agreement with experiment is achieved for the pressure dependence of the crystal structure unit cell parameters, densities, and intermolecular close contacts. The pressure dependence of the band gaps is investigated as well as the pressure induced phase transition of tetracene using both generalized gradient approximated and hybrid functionals. It is concluded that none of the oligoacenes investigated become conducting under elevated pressures, assuming that the molecular identity of the system is maintained.

Crystal Polymorphism in Oxalyl Dihydrazide: Is Empirical DFT-D Accurate Enough?

Crystalline oxalyl dihydrazide has five experimentally known polymorphs whose energetics are governed by subtle balances between intra- and intermolecular interactions, providing a severe challenge for theoretical crystal structure modeling. Previous work has shown that many common density functional methods that neglect van der Waals dispersion cannot correctly describe this system, but it has been argued that empirically dispersion-corrected DFT-D performs much better. Here, we examine these crystals with second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) and related levels of theory using the fragment-based hybrid many-body interaction method. The energetics prove sensitive to the treatment of electron-electron correlation, the basis set, many-body induction, three-body dispersion, and zero-point contributions. Nevertheless, our best predictions for the polymorph energy ordering based on dispersion-corrected MP2C calculations agree with the available experimental data. In contrast, lower levels of theory, including the common B3LYP-D* and D-PW91 dispersion-corrected density functional approximations, fail to reproduce experimental observations and/or the high-level calculations.