Pure phase and mixed phase TiO$_2$ nanoparticles have been produced using a pyrolytic method from a non-aqueous carboxylate precursor. The precursor was prepared by a multiphase cation exchange using pentanoic acid (C$_4$H$_9$COOH). The thermal stability, polymorph content, morphology, size distribution and surface region of the produced nanoparticles were studied by TGA/DSC, XRD, FTIR and TEM. High quality monodisperse nanoparticles have been produced in the size range from 7 to 27 nm. The nanoparticles showed room temperature ferromagnetism revealed by VSM within bound polaron model. The carboxylate precursor is a good alternative to standard sol-gel to produce nanoparticles free from impurities.
The relative energies of the low-pressure rutile, anatase, and brookite polymorphs and the high-pressure columbite polymorph of TiO$_2$ have been calculated as a function of temperature using the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method and density functional theory (DFT). The vibrational energies are found to be important on the scale of interest and significant quartic anharmonicity is found in the rutile phase. Static-lattice DFT calculations predict that anatase is lower in energy than rutile, in disagreement with experiment. The accurate description of electronic correlations afforded b…
Titanium dioxide, TiO$_2$, has multiple applications in catalysis, energy conversion and memristive devices because of its electronic structure. Most of these applications utilize the naturally existing phases: rutile, anatase and brookite. Despite the simple form of TiO$_2$ and its wide uses, there is long-standing disagreement between theory and experiment on the energetic ordering of these phases that has never been resolved. We present the first analysis of phase stability at zero temperature using the highly accurate many-body fixed node diffusion Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method. We also…
We have calculated heat capacity of TiO2 nanoparticles in three stable polymorphs by applying size and surface effects on heat capacity of the bulk structure. The size and surface corrections were imposed on the acoustic and optical bulk phonons, separately. The model used in the present work is a simple modification of the model proposed by Wang et al. We applied the modified model to obtain the specific heat capacity of 10-100 nm TiO2 nanoparticles. A very good consistency is observed between the computational and experimental data. Based on the modified model, particles with sizes larger th…
This paper reports on the structural and optical properties of Co-doped TiO2 thin films grown onto (0001) Al2O3 substrates by non-reactive pulsed laser deposition (PLD) using argon as buffer gas. It is shown that by keeping constant the substrate temperature at as low as 310 C and varying only the background gas pressure between 7 Pa and 70 Pa, it is possible to grow either epitaxial rutile or pure anatase thin films, as well as films with a mixture of both polymorphs. The optical band gaps of the films are red shifted in comparison to the values usually reported for undoped TiO2, which is con…
The wealth of properties of titanium dioxide relies on its various polymorphs and on their mixtures coupled with a sensitivity to crystallographic orientations. It is therefore pivotal to set out methods that allow surface structural identification. We demonstrate herein the ability of photoemission spectroscopy to provide Ti LMV (V = valence) Auger templates to quantitatively analyze TiO$_2$ polymorphs. The Ti LMV decay reflects Ti 4sp-O 2p hybridizations that are intrinsic properties of TiO$_2$ phases and orientations. Ti LMV templates collected on rutile (110), anatase (101), and (100) sing…
Titanium dioxide has been extensively studied in the rutile or anatase phases, while its high-pressure phases are less well understood, despite that many are thought to have interesting optical, mechanical and electrochemical properties. First-principles methods such as density functional theory (DFT) are often used to compute the enthalpies of TiO$_2$ phases at 0~K, but they are expensive and thus impractical for long time-scale and large system-size simulations at finite temperatures. On the other hand, cheap empirical potentials fail to capture the relative stablities of the various polymor…
Phase transition from anatase to rutile for the 70nm TiO2 crystallite has been investigated by annealing at different temperatures followed by TDPAC measurement of these TiO2 crystallites adsorbed with 181Hf tracer. The width of the peaks in XRD spectra for TiO2 crystallites annealed at different temperatures indicates the growth of the crystallites with temperature. The samples annealed upto 823K for 4hrs showed no phase transition, except the growth of the crystallites. However, it showed phase transition at the same temperature (823K), when annealed for longer duration. Annealing for shorte…
Predicting phase stabilities of crystal polymorphs is central to computational materials science and chemistry. Such predictions are challenging because they first require searching for potential energy minima and then performing arduous free-energy calculations to account for entropic effects at finite temperatures. Here, we develop a framework that facilitates such predictions by exploiting all the information obtained from random searches of crystal structures. This framework combines automated clustering, classification and visualisation of crystal structures with machine-learning estimati…
There have existed for a long time a paradigm that TiO phases at ambient conditions are stable only if structural vacancies are available. Using an evolutionary algorithm, we perform an ab initio search of possible zero-temperature polymorphs of TiO in wide pressure interval. We obtain the Gibbs energy of the competing phases taking into account entropy via quasiharmonic approximation and build the pressure-temperature diagram of the system. We reveal that two vacancy-free hexagonal phases are the most stable at relatively low temperatures in a wide range of pressures. The transition between t…
Recently, two-dimensional boron sheets have attracted a lot of attentions owing to their structural polymorphs and outstanding properties. And, due to chemical complexity and electron deficiency of B atoms, the 2D boron sheets are easy affected by the environment. So, exploring novel 2D boron oxides gets highly needed. In this study, we theoretically explored 2D boron oxides structures and their basic properties. We found 2D boron oxides are metals or semimetals, when oxygen concentration is low. More interesting, the B6O1 exhibits Dirac Loop near the Fermi level and the maximum Fermi velocity…
Novel Transformations of PbTiO3 with Pressure and Temperature
University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)（德国电子同步加速器）；State University of New York Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；European Synchrotron Radiation Facility（欧洲同步辐射装置）；National Institute of Technology, Agartala（阿加塔拉国立技术学院）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Carnegie Science（卡内基科学研究所）
