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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 37 records · Page 2

Optimizing the self-assembly of conjugated polymers and small molecules through structurally programmed non-covalent control

Organic conjugated polymers and oligomers are key electronic materials for applications such as transistors, photovoltaics, and light emitting devices due to their potential for solution processability, mechanical flexibility, and precise structure-based tuning compared to inorganic materials. In dilute environments, the optoelectronic properties of conjugated polymers are largely governed by their constitutional structure and, to a lesser degree, their solution-state intramolecular configuration. In the solid state, intramolecular conformation and intermolecular electronic coupling impact these properties substantially, especially in relation to device performance. Therefore, an increasingly important area of research concerning conjugated materials is developing design strategies aimed at optimizing the solid-state packing for electronic applications. Programming solid-state packing arrangements through discrete non-covalent interactions is an emerging strategy within the context of conjugated polymers. This review focuses on the use of the two most prevalent discrete and directional interactions used to dictate the self-assembly of conjugated polymers and oligomers—hydrogen bonds and chalcogen bonds. Further, we also discuss how these design motifs can imbue conjugated materials with appealing physical properties while simultaneously retaining or improving electronic capabilities.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

In-situ monitoring of atomically dispersed Pt sites supported on OMS-2 during CO 2 activation

Atomically dispersed catalysts have drawn great interest lately, as they showcase a high density of active sites, selectivity, and high turnover frequencies in oxidation chemistry due to labile oxygen activation. In contrast, the applications of these catalysts have lagged in reduction reactions due to the ambiguity caused by the sintering and restructuring of active sites. To bridge this gap, the evolution of Pt 4+ isomorphically substituted into an octahedral molecular sieve structure (OMS-2) under reductive conditions was correlatively characterized using multiple in-situ analytical techniques such as ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, environmental transmission electron microscopy, and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance. The surface dynamics of the Pt single atoms were revealed during the Reverse Water Gas Shift (RWGS) reaction, where the active sites were identified as two-coordinated platinum single atoms. Under reaction, we show nonbinding atoms adjacent to the single atoms restructured the motif of the single atoms to Pt 2+ via ion mobility of potassium, increasing the activation energy by 25.6 kJ/mol. Here, this work also highlights the potential for increased stability of the single atom sites via isomorphic substitution of the metal oxide support, since the Pt-OMS-2 catalyst retained activity for about 33 h before deactivation, after which nanoparticles were observed in TEM images. This work offers a new perspective in single atom synthesis using the metal oxide as the host for the single atom site, instead of adatoms on the surface

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Comparative Analysis of Corrinoid Profiles across Host-Associated and Environmental Samples

Vitamin B 12 (the cyanated form of cobalamin cofactors) is best known for its essential role in human health. In addition to its function in human metabolism, cobalamin also plays important roles in microbial metabolism and can impact microbial community function. Cobalamin is a member of the structurally diverse family of cofactors known as cobamides that are produced exclusively by certain prokaryotes. Cobamides are considered shared nutrients in microbial communities because the majority of bacteria that possess cobamide-dependent enzymes cannot synthesize cobamides de novo. Furthermore, different microbes have evolved metabolic specificity for particular cobamides, and therefore, the availability of cobamides in the environment is important for cobamide-dependent microbes. Determining the cobamides present in an environment of interest is essential for understanding microbial metabolic interactions. By examining the abundances of different cobamides in diverse environments, including 10 obtained in this study, we find that, contrary to its preeminence in human metabolism, cobalamin is relatively rare in many microbial habitats. Comparison of cobamide profiles of mammalian gastrointestinal samples and wood-feeding insects reveals that host-associated cobamide abundances vary and that fecal cobamide profiles differ from those of their host gastrointestinal tracts. Environmental cobamide profiles obtained from aquatic, soil, and contaminated groundwater samples reveal that the cobamide compositions of environmental samples are highly variable. As the only commercially available cobamide, cobalamin is routinely supplied during microbial culturing efforts. Furthermore, these findings suggest that cobamides specific to a given microbiome may yield greater insight into nutrient utilization and physiological processes that occur in these habitats.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Bridging the Void: Halogen Bonding and Aromatic Interactions to Program Luminescence and Electronic Properties of π -Conjugated Materials in the Solid State

π-Conjugated materials are promising candidates for emerging organic optoelectronic devices empowered by molecular design. The unsolved challenges of predicting and controlling their packing as solids, central to their properties and performance, currently limits their practical application. As noncovalent interactions drive packing, control over such interactions are critical to bridging from chemical structure to functional properties. In molecular crystals, halogen bonding and interactions of aromatic rings have emerged as versatile tools for noncovalent control with tailored luminescence and electronic properties. Here, we describe how the interplay of these directional and tunable interactions can engineer properties, including stimuli-responsive behavior. Specifically, halogen bonding can provide robust designs for directing 2D molecular assembly, whereas the intentional interactions of aromatic rings can yield metastable, switchable packing modes, as well as programmed stacking between layers of chromophores. Examples, herein, demonstrate clear relationships between assembly by design and resulting solid-state properties, and strategies presented offer guidance for future designs of π-conjugated molecular materials using specific aromatic interactions and halogen bonding.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Toward Hot Carrier Extraction in Intervalley Photovoltaic Devices

InGaAs heterostructures have demonstrated the means to maintain hot carrier behavior under practical operating conditions via valley photovoltaics. However, enhancing the extraction to create a fully operational hot carrier solar cell requires an enhanced understanding of the barriers inside such devices. A set of four InGaAs heterostructures altering the n + top layer of the structure has been produced to enable comparative analysis of the current density-voltage characterization and the relationship to the band and valley alignments.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Electronically Coupled 2D Polymer/MoS 2 Heterostructures

Emergent quantum phenomena in electronically coupled two-dimensional heterostructures are central to next-generation optical, electronic, and quantum information applications. Tailoring electronic band gaps in coupled heterostructures would permit control of such phenomena and is the subject of significant research interest. Two-dimensional polymers (2DPs) offer a compelling route to tailored band structures through the selection of molecular constituents. However, despite the promise of synthetic flexibility and electronic design, fabrication of 2DPs that form electronically coupled 2D heterostructures remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we report the rational design and optimized synthesis of electronically coupled semiconducting 2DP/2D transition metal dichalcogenide van der Waals heterostructures, demonstrate direct exfoliation of the highly crystalline and oriented 2DP films down to a few nanometers, and present the first thickness-dependent study of 2DP/MoS 2 heterostructures. In this work, control over the 2DP layers reveals enhancement of the 2DP photoluminescence by two orders of magnitude in ultrathin sheets and an unexpected thickness-dependent modulation of the ultrafast excited state dynamics in the 2DP/MoS 2 heterostructure. These results provide fundamental insight into the electronic structure of 2DPs and present a route to tune emergent quantum phenomena in 2DP hybrid van der Waals heterostructures.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Carbon Outgassing in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current Is Supported by Ekman Transport From the Sea Ice Zone in an Observation‐Based Seasonal Mixed‐Layer Budget

Despite its importance for the global cycling of carbon, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the processes driving annual and seasonal carbon fluxes in the high-latitude Southern Ocean. This is due in part to a historical paucity of observations in this remote, turbulent, and seasonally ice-covered region. Here, we use autonomous biogeochemical float data spanning 6 full seasonal cycles and with circumpolar coverage of the Southern Ocean, complemented by atmospheric reanalysis, to construct a monthly climatology of the mixed layer budget of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). We investigate the processes that determine the annual mean and seasonal cycle of DIC fluxes in two different zones of the Southern Ocean—the Sea Ice Zone (SIZ) and Antarctic Southern Zone (ASZ). We find that, annually, mixing with carbon-rich waters at the base of the mixed layer supplies DIC which is, in the ASZ, either used for net biological production or outgassed to the atmosphere. In contrast, in the SIZ, where carbon outgassing and the biological pump are weaker, the surplus of DIC is instead advected northward to the ASZ. In other words, carbon outgassing in the southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which has been attributed to remineralized carbon from deep water upwelled in the ACC, is also due to the wind-driven transport of DIC from the SIZ. These results stem from the first observation-based carbon budget of the circumpolar Southern Ocean and thus provide a useful benchmark to evaluate climate models, which have significant biases in this region.

Sauvé, Jade↗

Samarium: from a distorted-fcc phase to melting under dynamic compression using in-situ x-ray diffraction

Abstract Lattice and electronic structure interactions for f -electrons are fundamental challenges for lanthanide equation of state development. Difficulties in first-principles calculations, such as density functional theory (DFT), emphasize the need for well-characterized experimental data. Here, we measure in-situ x-ray diffraction of shocked samarium (Sm) and temperature along the Hugoniot for the first time, providing direct evidence for phase transitions. We report direct evidence of a distorted fcc (dfcc) phase at 23 GPa. Shocked samarium melts from the dfcc phase starting at 33 GPa (1333 K), with complete melt at 40 GPa (1468 K). Previous work indicated shock melt at 27 GPa (1200 K), underscoring the significance of x-ray measurements for detecting phase transitions. Interestingly, our observed melting is in sharp contrast with the melting reported by a diamond anvil cell study. These experimental data can tightly constrain first principles calculations and serve as key touchstones for equation of state modeling.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Light-activated microtubule-based two-dimensional active nematic

We assess the ability of two light responsive kinesin motor clusters to drive dynamics of microtubule-based active nematics: opto-K401, a processive motor, and opto-K365, a non-processive motor. Measurements reveal an order of magnitude improvement in the contrast of nematic flow speeds between maximally- and minimally-illuminated states for opto-K365 motors when compared to opto-K401 construct. For opto-K365 nematics, we characterize both the steady-state flow and defect density as a function of applied light. We also examine the transient behavior as the system switches between steady-states upon changes in light intensities. Although nematic flows reach a steady state within tens of seconds, the defect density exhibits transient behavior for up to 10 minutes, showing a separation between small-scale active flows and system-scale structural states. Furthermore, our work establishes an experimental platform that can exploit spatiotemporally-heterogeneous patterns of activity to generate targeted dynamical states.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Novel features and GPU performance analysis for EM particle transport in the Celeritas code

Celeritas is a new computational transport code designed for high-performance simulation of high-energy physics detectors. This work describes some of its current capabilities and the design choices that enable the rapid development of efficient on-device physics. The abstractions that underpin the code design facilitate low-level performance tweaks that require no changes to the higher-level physics code. We evaluate a set of independent changes that together yield an almost 40% speedup over the original GPU code for a net performance increase of 220× for a single GPU over a single CPU running 8.4M tracks on a small demonstration physics app.

Johnson, Seth R.↗

Celeritas: Accelerating Geant4 with GPUs

Celeritas [1] is a new Monte Carlo (MC) detector simulation code designed for computationally intensive applications (specifically, High Lumi- nosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) simulation) on high-performance heterogeneous architectures. In the past two years Celeritas has advanced from prototyping a GPU-based single physics model in infinite medium to implementing a full set of electromagnetic (EM) physics processes in complex geometries. The current release of Celeritas, version 0.3, has incorporated full device-based navigation, an event loop in the presence of magnetic fields, and detector hit scoring. New functionality incorporates a scheduler to offload electromagnetic physics to the GPU within a Geant4-driven simulation, enabling integration of Celeritas into high energy physics (HEP) experimental frameworks such as CMSSW. On the Summit supercomputer, Celeritas performs EM physics between 6 and 32 faster using the machine’s Nvidia GPUs compared to using only CPUs. When running a multithreaded Geant4 ATLAS test beam application with full hadronic physics, using Celeritas to accelerate the EM physics results in an overall simulation speedup of 1.8–2.3× on GPU and 1.2× on CPU.

Johnson, Seth R.↗

Doping CdSexTe1-x/CdTe Graded Absorber Films with Arsenic for Thin-Film Photovoltaics

CdTe thin-film photovoltaics have demonstrated some of the lowest costs of electricity generation owing to its low material cost and ease of manufacturing. However, the full potential of polycrystalline CdTe photovoltaics can only be realized if the open-circuit voltage can be increased beyond 1 V Open-circuit voltage ~850-900 mV has been consistently observed for state-of-the-art polycrystalline CdTe solar cells. Open-circuit voltage of over 1V has been demonstrated for single crystal CdTe devices by doping with Group V elements. Therefore, this study is aimed at understanding behavior of polycrystalline CdTe devices with arsenic doping, its activation and process and performance optimization in order to overcome current voltage limitations in CdTe solar cells.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Optimization of Source Material for in-situ Arsenic Doping via Vapor Transport Deposition of CdTe Films

In-situ doping of CdTe/CdSeTe films with arsenic is performed using pre-doped source material prepared by high pressure Bridgman (HPB) melt growth. Arsenic level in the source material is varied from 1018-1020 cm-3. Correspondingly, dopant incorporation in the films prepared using vapor transport deposition (VTD) varied from 3x1017 cm-3–1x1018cm-3. In this range, dopant activation is found to inversely correlate with the dopant incorporation, suggesting compensation. The results from this study indicate film properties can be adjusted by source material.

41 EE - Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)↗