Materials with low work functions are critical for an array of applications requiring the facile removal or efficient transport of electrons through a device. Perovskite oxides are a promising class of materials for finding low work functions, and here we target applications in thermionic and field electron emission. Perovskites have highly malleable compositions which enable tunable work function values over a wide range, robust stability at high temperatures, and high electronic conductivities. In this work, we screened over 2900 perovskite oxides in search of stable, conductive, low-work-function materials using Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods. Our work provides insight into the materials chemistry governing the work function value of a perovskite, where materials with barely filled d bands possess the lowest work functions. Our screening has resulted in a total of seven promising compounds, such as BaMoO3 and SrNb0.75Co0.25O3 with work functions of 1.1 eV and 1.5 eV, respectively. These promising materials and others presented in this study may find use as low work function electron emitters in high power vacuum electronic and thermionic energy conversion devices. Moreover, the database of calculated work functions and materials chemistry trends governing the value of the work function may aid in the engineering of perovskite heterojunction devices.
Metal halide perovskites have recently emerged as promising materials for the next generation of optoelectronic devices owing to their remarkable intrinsic properties. In the growth of perovskite crystals, the substrates are essential and play a vital role. Herein, substrate engineering in the growth of perovskite crystals have been reviewed. Particularly, various modified strategies and corresponding mechanism based on the substrate engineering applied to the optimization of thickness, nucleation and growth rate are highlighted. Then the alterable adhesion to substrates will also be discussed…
Organic-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells have recently attracted much attention due to their low-cost fabrication, flexibility, and high-power conversion efficiency. The reduction from three- to two-dimension (2D) promises an exciting opportunity to tune the electronic properties of organic-inorganic halide perovskites. Here, we propose first-principles density-functional theory based route to study the effect of reduced dimensionality, impurity doping, and heterostructure engineering on energy stability, band-gap and transport properties of 2D hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskite…
Symbolic regression (SR) is an emerging method for building analytical formulas to find models that best fit data sets. Here, SR was used to guide the design of new oxide perovskite catalysts with improved oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activities. An unprecedentedly simple descriptor, μ/t, where μ and t are the octahedral and tolerance factors, respectively, was identified, which accelerated the discovery of a series of new oxide perovskite catalysts with improved OER activity. We successfully synthesized five new oxide perovskites and characterized their OER activities. Remarkably, four of …
Perovskite stability is of the core importance and difficulty in current research and application of perovskite solar cells. Nevertheless, over the past century, the formability and stability of perovskite still relied on simplified factor based on human knowledge, such as the commonly used tolerance factor t. Combining machine learning (ML) with first-principles density functional calculations, we proposed a strategy to firstly calculate the decomposition energies, considered to be closely related to thermodynamic stability, of 354 kinds halide perovskites, establish the machine learning rela…
Organic-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells have attracted much attention due to their low-cost fabrication, flexibility, and high-power conversion efficiency. More recent efforts show that the reduction from three- to two-dimensions (2D) of organic-inorganic halide perovskites promises an exciting opportunity to tune their electronic properties. Here, we explore the effect of reduced dimensionality and heterostructure engineering on the intrinsic material properties, such as energy stability, bandgap and transport properties of 2D hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskites using first-pr…
We report on the discovery of a lead-free morphotropic phase boundary in Sm doped BiFeO3 with a simple perovskite structure using the combinatorial thin film strategy. The boundary is a rhombohedral to pseudo-orthorhombic structural transition which exhibits a ferroelectric (FE) to antiferroelectric (AFE) transition at approximately Bi0.86Sm0.14FeO3 with dielectric constant and out-of-plane piezoelectric coefficient comparable to those of epitaxial (001) oriented Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) thin films at the MPB. The discovered composition may be a strong candidate of a Pb-free piezoelectric replacement…
The discovery of double perovskites A2B(I)B(III)X6 (A=monovalent cation; B(I)/B(III) = metal cation; X = halogen) as Pb(II)-free alternatives has attracted widespread attention, making it possible to introduce d-block metal cations (e.g., d0 and d10) into halide perovskites. However, at present, there are quite limited insights into the underlying bonding orbitals for d-block metal cation-based halide perovskites. Here, we present an orbital engineering strategy to construct two-dimensional (2D) electronic structures in three-dimensional (3D) halide perovskites by rationally controlling the d …
Owing to their high energy-conversion efficiency and inexpensive fabrication routes, solar cells based on metal-organic halide perovskites have rapidly gained prominence as a disruptive technology. An attractive feature of perovskite absorbers is the possibility of tailoring their properties by changing the elemental composition through the chemical precursors. In this context, rational in silico design represents a powerful tool for mapping the vast materials landscape and accelerating discovery. Here we show that the optical band gap of metal-halide perovskites, a key design parameter for so…
Lead (Pb) halide perovskites have achieved great success in recent years due to their excellent optoelectronic properties, which is largely attributed to the lone-pair s orbital-derived antibonding states at the valence band edge. Guided by the key band-edge orbital character, a series of ns2-containing (i.e., Sn2+, Sb3+, Bi3+) Pb-free perovskite alternatives have been explored as potential photovoltaic candidates. On the other hand, based on the band-edge orbital components (i.e., M2+ s and p/X- p orbitals), a series of strategies have been proposed to optimize their optoelectronic properties…
Our first-principles results show that geometric frustration can be induced in thin films of multiferroic BiFeO3. We find that competing magnetic interactions occur in the so-called super-tetragonal phase of this material, which can be grown on strongly-compressive substrates. We show that the frustration level can be tuned by appropriately choosing the substrate; in fact, the three-dimensional spin order gets totally annihilated in a narrow range of epitaxial strains. We argue that the effects revealed here are not exclusive to BiFeO3, and predict that they also occur in multiferroic BiCoO3.
Molecular ferroelectrics have attracted increasing interests over the past decade due to mechanical flexibility, chemical diversity, environmental friendliness, easy-processing, and lightness. The performance of molecular ferroelectrics is approaching more and more competitive to their inorganic counterparts. Despite the chemical diversity and tunability of the molecular cations or anions, molecular ferroelectrics are not abundant. In particular, physical directed design principles for new discovery or performance optimization are still lacking. Here, through first-principles calculations, we …
Two critical limitations of organic-inorganic lead halide perovskite materials for solar cells are their poor stability in humid environments and inclusion of toxic lead. In this study, high-throughput density functional theory (DFT) methods are used to computationally model and screen 1845 halide perovskites in search of new materials without these limitations that are promising for solar cell applications. This study focuses on finding materials that are comprised of nontoxic elements, stable in a humid operating environment, and have an optimal bandgap for one of single junction, tandem Si-…
Polar heterogeneous photocatalysts were shown to lead to enhanced charge-carrier separation that results in superior activity for example for photocatalytic water splitting. Promising photocatalyst materials such as oxynitrides can be rendered polar by epitaxial strain, which however also increases their band gap, making them unsuitable for visible light absorption. This suggests a trade-off between small band gaps and polar distortions - both being crucial for the catalyst's efficiency. In this paper we investigate, using density functional theory calculations, the suitability of strained AB(…
Backward Mapping from Device Targets to Chemical Genomes for Interpretable Discovery of Phase-Stable Lead-Free Double Perovskites with DFT-Validated Design Rules
RAI Initiative Ltd（RAI倡议有限公司）；Bangladesh University of Textiles（孟加拉国纺织大学）；Universiti Putra Malaysia（马来西亚博特拉大学）；Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学研究所）；University of Liege（列日大学）
Engineering oxygen octahedra rotation patterns in $ABO_3$ perovskites is a powerful route to design functional materials. Here we propose a strategy that exploits point defects that create local electric dipoles and couple to the oxygen sublattice, enabling direct actuation on the rotational degrees of freedom. This approach, which relies on substituting an $A$ site with a smaller ion, paves a way to couple dynamically octahedra rotations to external electric fields. A common antisite defect, $\mathrm{Al_{La}}$ in rhombohedral LaAlO$_3$ is taken as a prototype to validate the idea, with atomis…
Halide perovskites are a promising class of materials for optoelectronic applications, due to their excellent optoelectronic performance. However, they suffer several dynamical degradation problems, the characterization of which is challenging in experiments. Atomic scale simulations can provide valuable insights, however, the high computational cost of traditional quantum mechanical methods such as DFT makes it difficult to model dynamical processes in large perovskite systems. In this work, we present a re-parameterized GFN1-xTB method for the accurate description of structural and dynamical…
Antiferromagnetic thin films typically exhibit a multi-domain state, and control of the antiferromagnetic Néel vector is challenging as antiferromagnetic materials are robust to magnetic perturbations. By relying on anisotropic in-plane strain engineering of epitaxial thin films of the prototypical antiferromagnetic material LaFeO3, uniaxial Néel vector control is demonstrated. Orthorhombic (011)- and (101)-oriented DyScO3, GdScO3 and NdGaO3 substrates are used to engineer different anisotropic in-plane strain states. The anisotropic in-plane strain stabilises structurally monodomain monoclini…
We performed ab initio simulations aimed at identifying the atomistic and electronic structure origin of the high valence and conduction band, and band gap tunability of halide perovskites. We found that the two key ingredients are the overlap between bivalent cation and halide atomic orbitals, and the electronic charge of the bottom of the conduction band (CBM) state on the Sn or Pb atoms. In particular, we found that lower gaps are associated to higher negative antibonding overlap, and higher CBM charge on the bivalent cation. Both overlap and CBM charge on Sn/Pb can be tuned by the chemical…
Critical to the development of improved solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology are novel compounds with high oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalytic activity and robust stability under cathode operating conditions. Approximately 2145 distinct perovskite compositions are screened for potential use as high activity, stable SOFC cathodes, and it is verified that the screening methodology qualitatively reproduces the experimental activity, stability, and conduction properties of well-studied cathode materials. The calculated oxygen p-band center is used as a first principle-based descriptor of …
Earths lower mantle extending from 670 to 2,990 km deep is predominantly composed of a perovskite-type (Mg,Fe)SiO3 phase1,2. The perovskite phase undergoes a structural phase transition to a post-perovskite phase responsible for D" layer seismic discontinuity2,3 at about 2690 km depth in the lowermost region of the lower mantle. However, structural basis of other seismic discontinuities occurring in the upper region of the lower mantle (700 km to 1,200 km deep) remains unexplained4-7, as no apparent change in the crystal symmetry of the orthorhombic perovskite phase has been reported5. We pres…
Design of novel artificial materials based on ferroelectric perovskites relies on the basic principles of electrostatic coupling and in-plane lattice matching. These rules state that the out-of-plane component of the electric displacement field and the in-plane components of the strain are preserved across a layered superlattice, provided that certain growth conditions are respected. Intense research is currently directed at optimizing materials functionalities based on these guidelines, often with remarkable success. Such principles, however, are of limited practical use unless one disposes o…
Halide perovskites have recently gained widespread attention for their exceptional optoelectronic properties which have been illuminated by extensive spectroscopic investigations. In this article, nanophotonic surface-engineering using soft-lithography has been used to reproduce nanostructures with enhanced functionalities. A non-invasive optical technique based on Raman and photolumines-cence (PL) spectroscopy is employed to investigate the interactive effect of the thermal and optical behaviour in surface-patterned hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskite thin films. The thermophys-ical pr…
Perovskite solar cells have achieved a substantial breakthrough via advanced interface engineerings. Reports have emphasized that combining the hybrid perovskites with Lewis base and graphene improve the performance; the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. Here, using density functional theory, we show that upon the formation of CH3NH3PbI3 interfaces with three different Lewis base molecules and graphene, the binding strength with S-donors thiocarbamide and thioacetamide is higher than with O-donor dimethyl sulfoxide, while the interface dipole and work function reduction tend …
Materials Science Institute of Seville. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)- Univ. Sevilla（塞维利亚材料科学研究所。西班牙国家研究委员会-塞维利亚大学）；Departamento de Física Aplicada I, Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学应用物理系）；Departamento de Química Física, Facultad de Química. Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学化学学院物理化学系）
The emergence of methyl-ammonium lead halide (MAPbX3) perovskites motivates the identification of unique properties giving rise to exceptional bulk transport properties, and identifying future materials with similar properties. Here, we propose that this "defect tolerance" emerges from fundamental electronic structure properties, including the orbital character of the conduction and valence band extrema, the effective masses, and the static dielectric constant. We use MaterialsProject.org searches and detailed electronic-structure calculations to demonstrate these properties in other materials…
Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites are exceedingly interesting candidates for new solar energy technologies, for both ground-based and space applications. However, their large-scale production is hampered by the lack of long-term stability, mostly associated to ion migration. The specific role of non-covalent bonds in contributing to the stability remains elusive, and in certain cases controversial. Here, we perform an investigation on a large perovskite chemical space via a combination of first-principles calculations for the bond strengths and the recently developed Sure Independent Screen…
Organohalide perovskite with a variety of surface structures and morphologies have shown promising potential owing to the choice of the type of heterostructure dependent stability. We systematically investigate and discuss the impact of 2-dimensional molybdenum-disulphide (MoS2), molybdenum-diselenide (MoSe2), tungsten-disulphide (WS2), tungsten-diselenide (WSe2), boron- nitiride (BN) and graphene monolayers on band-gap and energy stability of organic-inorganic halide perovskites. We found that MAPbI3ML deposited on BN-ML shows room temperature stability (-25 meV~300K) with an optimal bandgap …
Compositional disorder induces myriad captivating phenomena in perovskites. Target-driven discovery of perovskite solid solutions has been a great challenge due to the analytical complexity introduced by disorder. Here, we demonstrate that an unsupervised deep learning strategy can find fingerprints of disordered materials that embed perovskite formability and underlying crystal structure information by learning only from the chemical composition, manifested in (A1-xA'x)BO3 and A(B1-xB'x)O3 formulae. This phenomenon can be capitalized to predict the crystal symmetry of experimental composition…
We report charge-transfer up to a single electron per interfacial unit cell across non-polar heterointerfaces from the Mott insulator LaTiO3 to the charge transfer insulator LaCoO3. In high-quality bi- and tri-layer systems grown using pulsed laser deposition, soft X-ray absorption, dichroism and STEM-EELS are used to probe the cobalt 3d-electron count and provide an element-specific investigation of the magnetic properties. The experiments prove a deterministically-tunable charge transfer process acting in the LaCoO3 within three unit cells of the heterointerface, able to generate full conver…
Switchable Polarization in an A-site Deficient Perovskite through Vacancy and Cation Engineering
Kyoto University（京都大学）；Nantes Université（南特大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Japan Fine Ceramics Center（日本先进陶瓷中心）；Kyushu University（九州大学）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Strain engineering with different substrate facets is promising for tuning functional properties of thin film perovskite oxides. By choice of facet, different surface symmetries and chemical bond directions for epitaxial interfaces can be tailored. Here, preparation of well-defined pseudo-cubic (111)-oriented orthorhombic substrates of DyScO3 , GdScO3 , and NdGaO3 is reported. The choice of orthorhombic facet, (011)o or (101)o , both corresponding to pseudo-cubic (111)pc , gives vicinal surfaces with single or double (111pc layer terrace step heights, respectively, impacting subsequent thin fi…
This study introduces a new chemical method for controlling the strain in methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3) perovskite crystals by varying the ratio of Pb(Ac)2 and PbCl2 in the precursor solution. To observe the effect on crystal strain, a combination of piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) is used. The PFM images show an increase in the average size of ferroelastic twin domains upon increasing the PbCl2 content, indicating an increase in crystal strain. The XRD spectra support this observation with strong crystal twinning features that appear in the spectra. This…
Perovskite nanoplatelets possess extremely narrow absorption and emission linewidths, which are crucial characteristics for many optical applications. However, their underlying intrinsic and extrinsic line-broadening mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we apply multi-dimensional coherent spectroscopy to determine the homogeneous line-broadening of colloidal perovskite nanoplatelet ensembles. We demonstrate control of not only their intrinsic linewidths, but also control of various broadening mechanisms by tuning the platelet geometry. Remarkably, we find that decreasing nanoplatelet thickn…
Organic-inorganic metal halide perovskite devices have generated significant interest for LED, photodetector, and solar cell applications due to their attractive optoelectronic properties and substrate-choice flexibility1-4. These devices exhibit slow time-scale response, which have been explained by point defect migration5-6. In this work, we report the discovery of a room temperature intrinsic amplification process in methylammonium lead iodide perovskite (MAPbI3) that can be triggered by few photons, down to a single photon. The electrical properties of the material, by way of photoresponse…
Materials with strong spin-orbit coupling have attracted attention following the prediction and subsequent discovery of strong two- and three-dimensional topological insulators in which a topological property of the bulk band structure of an insulator results in metallic surface states with Dirac-like dispersion. Here we report the discovery of Dirac-like surface states in the perovskite superconductor [Tl$_4$]TlTe$_3$ (Tl5Te3) and its non-superconducting tin-doped derivative, [Tl4](Tl$_{0.4}$Sn$_{0.6}$)Te$_3$, as observed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Density functiona…
Predicting the stability of the perovskite structure remains a longstanding challenge for the discovery of new functional materials for many applications including photovoltaics and electrocatalysts. We developed an accurate, physically interpretable, and one-dimensional tolerance factor, τ, that correctly predicts 92% of compounds as perovskite or nonperovskite for an experimental dataset of 576 $ABX_3$ materials ($\textit{X} =$ $O^{2-}$, $F^-$, $Cl^-$, $Br^-$, $I^-$) using a novel data analytics approach based on SISSO (sure independence screening and sparsifying operator). τ is shown to gen…
Tuning the optoelectronic properties of wide bandgap perovskites: Data-driven insights from combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput experimentation
Empa–Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology（瑞士联邦材料科学与技术研究院）
Hitting hard on the binary halides yields in the formation of Cs2[AgIn]Br6. The lead-free double perovskite marks, although not usable itself, a further step forward in finding sustainable and durable perovskite materials for photovoltaic applications. Cs2[AgIn]Br6 is one of the prominent examples of double perovskites materials that have been suggested to circumvent the use of lead compounds in perovskite solar cells. We herein report the successful synthesis of the material using a mechanochemical approach. It crystallizes in an elpasolite-type structure, an ordered perovskite superstructure…
We use a combination of symmetry arguments and first-principles calculations to explore the connection between structural distortions and ferroelectricity in the perovskite family of materials. We explain the role of octahedral rotations in suppressing ferroelectricity in these materials and show that, as the tolerance factor decreases, rotations alone cannot fully suppress ferroelectricity. Our results show that it is cation displacements (`hidden' in Glazer notation) that accompany the rotations, rather than the rotations themselves, that play the decisive role in suppressing ferroelectricit…
There are few known semiconductors exhibiting both strong optical response and large dielectric polarizability. Inorganic materials with large dielectric polarizability tend to be wide-band gap complex oxides. Semiconductors with strong photoresponse to visible and infrared light tend to be weakly polarizable. Interesting exceptions to these trends are halide perovskites and phase-change chalcogenides. Here we introduce complex chalcogenides in the Ba-Zr-S system in perovskite and Ruddlesden-Popper structures as a new family of highly polarizable semiconductors. We report the results of impeda…
Transfer learning discovery of molecular modulators for perovskite solar cells
Peking University（北京大学）；DP Technology（DP科技）；Shanxi University（山西大学）；Peking University Yangtze Delta Institute of Optoelectronics（北京大学长三角光电科学研究院）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
The discovery of lead free all-inorganic alloyed double perovskites have revolutionized photovoltaic research, showing promising light emitting efficiency and its tunability. However, detailed studies regarding optical, exciton, polaron and transport properties remain unexplored. Here, we report a theoretical study on the variation of carrier-lattice interaction and optoelectronic properties of pristine as well as alloyed Cs$_2$AgInCl$_6$ double perovskites. We have employed many-body perturbation theory (G$_0$W$_0$@HSE06) and density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) to compute exciton bi…
