Insight into the role of reduced graphene oxide for enhancing photocatalytic hydrogen evolution in disordered carbon nitride

Compared to crystalline carbon nitride, the performance of disordered carbon nitride (d-CN) as a hydrogen production photocatalyst is extremely poor. Owing to disordered atomic orientation, it is prone to numerous...

Soft Ferroelectrics Enabling High-Performance Intelligent Photo Electronics

Soft ferroelectrics based on organic and organic-inorganic hybrid materials have gained much interest among researchers owing to their electrically programmable and remnant polarization. This allows for the development of numerous flexible, foldable, and stretchable nonvolatile memories, when combined with various crystal engineering approaches to optimize their performance. Soft ferroelectrics have been recently considered to have an important role in the emerging human-connected electronics that involve diverse photoelectronic elements, particularly those requiring precise programmable electric fields, such as tactile sensors, synaptic devices, displays, photodetectors, and solar cells for facile human-machine interaction, human safety, and sustainability. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent developments in soft ferroelectric materials with an emphasis on their ferroelectric switching principles and their potential application in human-connected intelligent electronics. Based on the origins of ferroelectric atomic and/or molecular switching, the soft ferroelectrics are categorized into seven subgroups. In this review, the efficiency of soft ferroelectrics with their distinct ferroelectric characteristics utilized in various human-connected electronic devices with programmable electric field is demonstrated. This review inspires further research to utilize the remarkable functionality of soft electronics.

DFT study of the influence of impurities on the structural, electronic, optoelectronic, and nonlinear optical properties of graphene nanosheet functionalized by the carboxyl group -COOH

In this work, we propose a modified model of graphene oxide nanosheet (GON), based on the Lerf-Klinowski model, through which we attach a carboxyl group (GON-COOH) to the non-equivalent C atom of coronene-based graphene oxide with formation of sp3-like orbital bond. Beryllium, boron, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine atoms are integrated into the GON at identical sites in order to study their impact on the physical and chemical properties of GON. Our aim is to propose new efficient materials for applications in optoelectronics and nonlinear optics (NLO). Chemical reactivity and structural, optical, and nonlinear optical properties of GON and its derivatives GON-X (X: Be, B, N, O, and F atoms) were investigated by using the density functional theory (DFT) at the B3LYP-D3/6-31+G(d,p) level of theory. According to the results obtained, the binding energy per atom of GON compound decreases slightly with addition of atoms of the second period elements of the periodic table. The GON-F compound exhibits the smallest value of gap energy compared to other studied compounds and can then be considered a proficient candidate for photovoltaic applications. In regard to NLO properties, we found that the studied models of GON compound theoretically exhibit a larger value of the first static hyperpolarizability than urea, the reference compound for NLO properties.

Dual photoluminescence and charge transport in an alkoxy biphenyl benzoate ferroelectric liquid crystalline–graphene oxide composite

GO has been dispersed in a ferroelectric liquid crystalline material to prepare a FLC–GO composite.