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Human researchers multi-task, collaborate, and share resources. HELAO-async is a multi-workflow automation software that helps realize these attributes in materials acceleration platforms.
Although the recent development of Y-series small-molecule acceptors (SMAs) has led to a dramatic increase in the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic solar cells (OSCs), the operational stability (device lifetime) of OSCs is inadequate for commercialization. In this study, we develop a new trimer acceptor (TYT), consisting of three Y-based molecules linked by electron-donating spacers, to realize an OSC with high-performance (PCE > 18%) and -stability (t 80% lifetime > 8000 h under 1 sun illumination, in which t 80% lifetime is the time required for the PCE of the OSC to reach 80% of its initial value). We demonstrate that the trimerization approach affords an acceptor, TYT, with an upshifted lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy level, which, in turn, affords an efficient OSC with a high open-circuit voltage (0.964 V). In addition, the glass-transition temperature (T g ) of TYT (217 °C) is significantly higher than those of monomer (MYT, T g = 80 °C) and dimer (DYT, T g = 127 °C) acceptors, which effectively suppresses the molecular diffusion of TYT in a blend film with a polymer donor. Accordingly, a TYT-based OSC demonstrates a high PCE (18.2%) and long t 80% lifetime under 1 sun illumination (8454 h), outperforming MYT- and DYT-based OSCs that exhibit PCEs and t 80% lifetimes of 16.4% and 35 h, and 17.3% and 2551 h, respectively. Therefore, this study provides important guidelines for the design of electron acceptors in achieving OSCs with high performance and stability close to a commercial level.
Molecular aggregates exhibit emergent properties, including the collective sharing of electronic excitation energy known as exciton delocalization, that can be leveraged in applications such as quantum computing, optical information processing, and light harvesting. In a previous study, we found unexpectedly large excitonic interactions (quantified by the excitonic hopping parameter J m,n ) in DNA-templated aggregates of squaraine (SQ) dyes with hydrophilic-imparting sulfo and butylsulfo substituents. Here, we characterize DNA Holliday junction (DNA-HJ) templated aggregates of an expanded set of SQs and evaluate their optical properties in the context of structural heterogeneity. Specifically, we characterized the orientation of and J m,n between dyes in dimer aggregates of non-chlorinated and chlorinated SQs. Here, three new chlorinated SQs that feature a varying number of butylsulfo substituents were synthesized and attached to a DNA-HJ via a covalent linker to form adjacent and transverse dimers. Various characteristics of the dye, including its hydrophilicity (in terms of log P o/w ) and surface area, and of the substituents, including their local bulkiness and electron withdrawing capacity, were quantified computationally.
Single-crystalline Ni-rich cathodes are promising for the next generation of high-energy-density Li-ion batteries due to their better capacity retention than their polycrystalline counterparts. However, there is still much room for improving the electrochemical performances when considering their surface degradation and severe kinetic hindrance during cycling. Herein, we report a strategy to construct an in situ formed robust Li-conductive Li 3 PO 4 layer on the surface of cathode particles. This Li-conductive layer significantly increases the Li-ion diffusion coefficients and suppresses detrimental surface phase transformation. In situ XRD reveals that the improved kinetics alleviate the local stress at high voltage. The as-prepared single-crystalline LiNi 0.83 Co 0.12 Mn 0.05 O 2 delivers good durability (96.8% after 100 cycles at 1C) and excellent rate capability (177.08 mA h g -1 at 5C). Here, this work provides a facile and efficient strategy to improve the cycling performance and boost the rate capability of single-crystalline Ni-rich cathodes.
Non-precious metal catalysts for acidic OER typically require a high concentration of activity-promoting elements, e.g. , Mn. We describe the high throughput discovery of quinary oxide catalysts with low Mn concentration via mixing with Sb, Sn, and Ti.
Ovonic threshold switching (OTS) selector can effectively improve the storage density and suppress the leakage current of advanced phase-change memory. As a prototypical OTS material, amorphous GeSe is widely investigated. But the attentions paid to amorphous Se (i.e., the functional constituent in amorphous GeSe) is very limited up to now. Here, in this work, we have explored the structure, bonding and electronic characteristics of amorphous Se using ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. The results reveal that the Se atoms in amorphous Se tend to form the 2-coordinated configurations, and they connect with each other to form the long chains. The fraction of vibrational density of state located in high frequency range is relatively large, and the formation energy of Se-Se bond is as large as 4.44 eV, hinting that the Se-Se bonds in chains possess a high stability. In addition, the mid-gap state related to the OTS behavior is also found in the amorphous Se despite of the small proportion. Our findings enrich the knowledge of the amorphous Se, which contributes to the applications of Se-based OTS selectors.
Here, we report carbon-supported Ni-nanoparticles as reusable catalysts for reductive amidation of nitro compounds with polylactic acid (PLA).
We synthesize a series of benzobisthiazole-incorporating polymer donors (PM6-DTzB X ) to achieve efficient, thermally-stable, mechanically-robust polymer solar cells (PSCs) by non-halogenated solution processing.
Here, this article presents an overview of the current state of the art in the structure determination of microporous carbon-capture materials, as discussed at the recent NIST workshop “Integrating Crystallographic and Computational Approaches to Carbon-Capture Materials for the Mitigation of Climate Change”. The continual rise in anthropogenic CO 2 concentration and its effect on climate change call for the implementation of carbon capture technologies to reduce the CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere. Porous solids, including metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), are feasible candidates for gas capture and storage applications. However, determining the structure of these materials represents a significant obstacle in their development into advanced sorbents. The existing difficulties can be overcome by integrating crystallographic methods and theoretical modeling. The workshop gathered experimentalists and theorists from academia, government, and industry to review this field and identify approaches, including collaborative opportunities, required to develop tools for rapid determination of the structures of porous solid sorbents and the effect of structure on the carbon capture performance. We highlight the findings of that workshop, especially in the need for reference materials, standardized procedures and reporting of sorbent activation and adsorption measurements, standardized reporting of theoretical calculations, and round-robin structure determination.
Ternary strategies have critical roles in pursuing high efficiencies for organic solar cells (OSCs).
Correction to Grant Acknowledgment section.
Like fungi and some prokaryotes, plants use a thiazole synthase (THI4) to make the thiazole precursor of thiamin. Fungal THI4s are suicide enzymes that destroy an essential active-site Cys residue to obtain the sulfur atom needed for thiazole formation. In contrast, certain prokaryotic THI4s have no active-site Cys, use sulfide as sulfur donor, and are truly catalytic. The presence of a conserved active-site Cys in plant THI4s and other indirect evidence implies that they are suicidal. To confirm this, we complemented the Arabidopsistz-1 mutant, which lacks THI4 activity, with a His-tagged Arabidopsis THI4 construct. LC–MS analysis of tryptic peptides of the THI4 extracted from leaves showed that the active-site Cys was predominantly in desulfurated form, consistent with THI4 having a suicide mechanism in planta. Unexpectedly, transcriptome data mining and deep proteome profiling showed that barley, wheat, and oat have both a widely expressed canonical THI4 with an active-site Cys, and a THI4-like paralog (non-Cys THI4) that has no active-site Cys and is the major type of THI4 in developing grains. Transcriptomic evidence also indicated that barley, wheat, and oat grains synthesize thiamin de novo, implying that their non-Cys THI4s synthesize thiazole. Structure modeling supported this inference, as did demonstration that non-Cys THI4s have significant capacity to complement thiazole auxotrophy in Escherichia coli. There is thus a prima facie case that non-Cys cereal THI4s, like their prokaryotic counterparts, are catalytic thiazole synthases. Bioenergetic calculations show that, relative to suicide THI4s, such enzymes could save substantial energy during the grain-filling period.
The halo assembly bias, a phenomenon referring to dependencies of the large-scale bias of a dark matter halo other than its mass, is a fundamental property of the standard cosmological model. First discovered in 2005 from the Millennium Run simulation, it has been proven very difficult to be detected observationally, with only a few convincing claims of detection so far. The main obstacle lies in finding an accurate proxy of the halo formation time. In this study, by utilizing a constrained simulation that can faithfully reproduce the observed structures larger than 2 Mpc in the local universe, for a sample of 634 massive clusters at z ≤ 0.12, we found their counterpart halos in the simulation and used the mass growth history of the matched halos to estimate the formation time of the observed clusters. This allowed us to construct a pair of early- and late-forming clusters, with a similar mass as measured via weak gravitational lensing, and large-scale biases differing at the ≈3σ level, suggestive of the signature of assembly bias, which is further corroborated by the properties of cluster galaxies, including the brightest cluster galaxy and the spatial distribution and number of member galaxies. Our study paves a way to further detect assembly bias based on cluster samples constructed purely on observed quantities.
This study investigates a plasmonic Roche lobe that is based on a metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) structure using finite-difference time-domain simulations and theoretical analyses. The effective refractive index of the MDM structure has two centers and is inversely proportional to the distance from the position of interest to the centers, in a manner that is analogous to the gravitational potential in a two-star system. The motion of surface plasmons (SPs) strongly depends on the ratio of permittivities at the two centers. The Lagrange point is an unstable equilibrium point for SPs that propagate in the system. After the SPs have passed through the Lagrange point, their spread drastically increases.
This study investigates the resonant effects on nonlinear photoionization of Li{sub 4} cluster under femtosecond laser irradiation. The real-time and real-space time-dependent density functional theory is applied to describe the optical linear response and nonlinear electron dynamics during the laser-material interactions. The calculations describe well the behaviors of the ionization process for both the off resonance and on resonance cases. For given laser intensities, the frequency dependence of electron ionization and energy absorption on multiphoton and/or tunnel ionization mechanisms is investigated. Theoretical results show that (1) the off resonance behaves as a classical oscillator whereas resonance leads to an internal excitation with subsequent emission of electrons after the laser termination; (2) when multiphoton ionization dominates, the frequency dependence of emitted electrons and absorbed energy coincides with trend of the spectral cross section for photon absorption; (3) while when tunnel ionization becomes significant, the aforementioned correlation gradually disappears, and the enhancement of resonant effect on photoionization is not manifest.
The J = 1 ← J = 0 and J = 2 ← J = 1 rotational transitions of ruthenium monocarbide, RuC, have been recorded using the separated field pump/probe microwave optical double resonance technique and analyzed to determine the fine and hyperfine parameters for the X{sup 1}Σ{sup +} state. The {sup 101}Ru(I = 5/2) electric quadrupole parameter, eq{sub 0}Q, and nuclear spin-rotation interaction parameter, C{sub I}{sup eff}, were determined to be 433.19(8) MHz and −0.049(6) MHz, respectively. The equilibrium bond distance, r{sub e}, was determined to be 1.605485(2) Å. Hartree-Fock and coupled-cluster calculations were carried out for the properties of the X{sup 1}Σ{sup +} state. Electron-correlation effects are pronounced for all properties studied. It is shown that (a) the moderate scalar-relativistic contribution to eq{sub 0}Q is entirely due to the coupling between scalar-relativistic and electron-correlation effects, (b) the spin-free exact two-component theory in its one-electron variant offers a reliable and efficient treatment of scalar-relativistic effects, and (c) non-relativistic theory performs quite well for the prediction of C{sub I}{sup elec}, provided that electron correlation is treated accurately.
A perturbative approach to compute second-order spin-orbit (SO) corrections to a spin-free Dirac-Coulomb Hartree-Fock (SFDC-HF) calculation is suggested. The proposed scheme treats the difference between the DC and SFDC Hamiltonian as perturbation and exploits analytic second-derivative techniques. In addition, a cost-effective scheme for incorporating relativistic effects in high-accuracy calculations is suggested consisting of a SFDC coupled-cluster treatment augmented by perturbative SO corrections obtained at the HF level. Benchmark calculations for the hydrogen halides HX, X = F-At as well as the coinage-metal fluorides CuF, AgF, and AuF demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed perturbative treatment of SO effects on energies and electrical properties in comparison with the more rigorous full DC treatment. Furthermore, we present, as an application of our scheme, results for the electrical properties of AuF and XeAuF.
We reported a high-efficiency and low-cost nano-pattern method, the nanospherical-lens photolithography technique, to fabricate a SiO{sub 2} mask for selective area growth. By controlling the selective growth, we got a highly ordered hexagonal nanopyramid light emitting diodes with InGaN/GaN quantum wells grown on nanofacets, demonstrating an electrically driven phosphor-free white light emission. We found that both the quantum well width and indium incorporation increased linearly along the (101{sup ¯}1) planes towards the substrate and the perpendicular direction to the (101{sup ¯}1) planes as well. Such spatial distribution was responsible for the broadband emission. Moreover, using cathodoluminescence techniques, it was found that the blue emission originated from nanopyramid top, resembling the quantum dots, green emission from the InGaN quantum wells layer at the middle of sidewalls, and yellow emission mainly from the bottom of nanopyramid ridges, similar to the quantum wires.