The presence of first sharp diffraction peaks in the partial structure factors is investigated in computer simulations of molten mixtures of alkali halides. An intermediate range ordering appears for the Li+ ions only, which is associated with clustering of this species and is not reflected in the arrangement of other ions. This ordering is surprising in view of the simplicity of the interionic interactions in alkali halides. The clustering reflects an incomplete mixing of the various species on a local length scale, which can be demonstrated by studying the complementary sub-space of cations in the corresponding pure alkali halides by means of a void analysis.
Using first principles calculations we show that several alkali lead halides potentially present collective ferroelectric polarization. This should occur at least at the nanoscale; it could be detected macroscopically provided it is not concealed by lattice vibrations in the temperature range of stability of the cubic perovskite phase. For potassium lead halides and for alkali lead fluorides, remarkably, the ferroelectric behavior turns hyper-ferroelectric, suggesting a more robust ferroelectric polarization in spite of depolarization potentials induced by charge accumulation on surfaces or in…
Favorable optoelectronic properties and ease of fabrication make NiO a promising hole transport layer for perovskite solar cells. To achieve maximum efficiency, the electronic levels of NiO need to be optimally aligned with those of the perovskite absorber. Applying surface modifiers by adsorbing species on the NiO surface, is one of the most widespread strategies to tune its energy levels. Alkali halides are simple inorganic surface modifiers that have been extensively used in organic optoelectronics, however, rarely studied in perovskite solar cells. Using density functional theory (DFT) cal…
Electronic properties of metal induced gap states at insulator/metal interfaces -- dependence on the alkali halide and the possibility of excitonic mechanism of superconductivity
Kiguchi {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 90}，196803（2003）]中，我们用第一原理密度泛函方法理论上研究了在各种碱金属卤化物和由凝胶表示的金属之间的界面处的MIGS的电子性质。我们已经发现，在通常的倏逝态之上，MIGS通常在卤素位点上具有长尾巴，具有$p_z$样特征，其穿透深度（$λ$）大到本体碱金属卤化物的晶格常数的一半。这意味着，$λ$，虽然几乎不依赖于凝胶中的载流子密度，但由碱金属卤化物的晶格常数（因此由能隙）主导，其中$λ_{\rm LiF} < λ_{\rm LiCl} < λ_{\rm LiI}$。我们还提出了一种可能性的MIGS工作有利的激子介导的超导性。
The alkali halides, known as ionic crystals, have the NaCl-type or CsCl-type structure as the ground state. We study the structural, vibrational, and electronic properties of two-dimensional (2D) ionic crystals from first-principles. Two potential structures that are hexagonal and tetragonal are investigated as structural templates. Through phonon dispersion calculations, 8 and 16 out of 20 alkali halides in the hexagonal and tetragonal structures are dynamically stable, respectively. The electron energy gaps range from 6.8 eV for LiF to 3.9 eV for RbI and CsI in the tetragonal structure withi…
Off-center impurities in alkali halides: reorientation, electric polarization and binding to F center. V. Temperature-dependent electrostatic polarizabilities
Perovskite solar cells have shown remarkable efficiencies beyond 22%, through organic and inorganic cation alloying. However, the role of alkali-metal cations is not well-understood. By using synchrotron-based nano-X-ray fluorescence and complementary measurements, we show that when adding RbI and/or CsI the halide distribution becomes homogenous. This homogenization translates into long-lived charge carrier decays, spatially homogenous carrier dynamics visualized by ultrafast microscopy, as well as improved photovoltaic device performance. We find that Rb and K phase-segregate in highly conce…
The alkali-trihalogeno-germanates AGeX$_3$ with A a large single positive ion such as Rb, Cs, or organic radicals such as methyl ammonium (MA), and X a halogen (I, Br, Cl, F) along with the corresponding stannates (ASnX$_3$) and plumbates (APbX$_3$) exhibit a large variety of crystal structures, some of which are of the perovskite type. These materials, better known as "halide perovskites'' have recently gained worldwide attention as promising photovoltaic and more broadly opto-electronic materials. But their stability problems relative to the non-perovskite phases is a major issue. Here we sh…
The usage of molten salts, e.g., Na2MoO4 and Na2WO4, has shown great success in the growth of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In comparison with the halide salt (i.e., NaCl, NaBr, KI)-assisted growth (Salt 1.0), the molten salt-assisted vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth technique (Salt 2.0) has improved the reproducibility, efficiency and scalability of synthesizing 2D TMDCs. However, the growth of large-area MoSe2 and WTe2 is still quite challenging with the use Salt 2.0 technique. In this study, a renewed Salt 2.0 technique usin…
Recently, replacing or mixing organic molecules in the hybrid halide perovskites with the inorganic Cs or Rb cations has been reported to increase the material stability with the comparable solar cell performance. In this work, we systematically investigate the electronic and optical properties of all-inorganic alkali iodide perovskites Rb1-xCsxPbI3 using the first-principles virtual crystal approximation calculations. Our calculations show that as increasing the Cs content x, lattice constants, band gaps, exciton binding energies, and effective masses of charge carriers decrease following the…
Great achievements have been made in alloying of two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), which can allow tunable band gaps for practical applications in optoelectronic devices. However, telluride-based TMDs alloys were less studied due to the difficulties of sample synthesis. Here, in this work we report the large-area synthesis of 2D MoTexSe2-x alloy films with controllable Te composition by a modified alkali metal halides assisted chemical vapor deposition method. The as-prepared films have millimeter-scale transverse size. Raman spectra experiments combi…
