Bilayers of Ni3C12S12 and Pt3C12S12: graphene-like 2D topological insulators tunable by electric fields

Electrochemical phase diagrams of Ni from ab initio simulations: role of exchange interactions on accuracy

The stabilities of Ni metal and its derived compounds, including oxides, hydroxides, and oxyhydroxides under electrochemical conditions, can be readily predicted from the Ni Pourbaix diagram, where the formation free energies of the involved species are utilized to construct the phase stability map with respect to electrode potential and pH. We calculate and analyze the crystal structures, electronic structures, and thermodynamic energies of Ni metal and its compounds using different exchange-correlation functionals to density-functional-theory (DFT), including the semilocal LDA and GGA density functionals, the nonlocal metaGGA, and the hybrid density functionals. Next, we simulate the corresponding Ni Pourbaix diagrams to compare systematically the performance of the functional to each other and to experimental observations. We show that the structures and energies obtained from experimental databases may not be sufficiently accurate to describe direct electrochemical observations, and we explain how the electronic exchange within the density functionals plays a key role in determining the accuracy of the DFT calculated electronic, thermodynamic, and electrochemical properties. We find that only the hybrid density functional produces reliable results owing to the fractional contribution of exact Fock exchange included therein. Last, based on our accurate Ni Pourbaix diagram, we construct band-gap and magnetic electrochemical maps which can facilitate more experimental measurements and property assessments under variable potential and pH in the future.

A bird's eye view on the flat and conic band world of the honeycomb and Kagome lattices: towards an understanding of 2D metal-organic frameworks electronic structure

We present a thorough tight-binding analysis of the band structure of a wide variety of lattices belonging to the class of honeycomb and Kagome systems including several mixed forms combining both lattices. The band structure of these systems are made of a combination of dispersive and flat bands. The dispersive bands possess Dirac cones (linear dispersion) at the six corners (K points) of the Brillouin zone although in peculiar cases Dirac cones at the center of the zone [Formula: see text] point) appear. The flat bands can be of different nature. Most of them are tangent to the dispersive bands at the center of the zone but some, for symmetry reasons, do not hybridize with other states. The objective of our work is to provide an analysis of a wide class of so-called ligand-decorated honeycomb Kagome lattices that are observed in a 2D metal-organic framework where the ligand occupy honeycomb sites and the metallic atoms the Kagome sites. We show that the p _x -p _y graphene model is relevant in these systems and there exists four types of flat bands: Kagome flat (singly degenerate) bands, two kinds of ligand-centered flat bands (A₂ like and E like, respectively doubly and singly degenerate) and metal-centered (three fold degenerate) flat bands.

Bilayers of Ni3C12S12 and Pt3C12S12: graphene-like 2D topological insulators tunable by electric fields

In the present work we predict, through first-principles calculations, that bilayers of the recently synthesized Ni₃ [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] and Pt₃ [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] layered materials are topological insulators upon electron doping, and that their topological insulator properties can be modulated by the application of electric fields with magnitudes achievable in devices. The electronic structures of both bilayers are characterized by spin-orbit split graphene-like bands, with gap magnitudes that are three orders of magnitude larger than graphene's. In ribbon geometries, chiral edge modes develop at each side with band dispersions similar to that of Kane-Mele graphene model. Surprisingly, the edge states' spin-propagation locking occurs even for very thin ribbons. We also find that the response of the electronic structure of both materials to applied electric fields are similar to both graphene and the Kane-Mele model with a Rashba term. All these findings indicate that these bilayer systems can be considered as large-spin-orbit graphene analogues with a strong sensitivity to applied electric fields.