Materials Virtual Lab

We are pleased to announce the release of the Grain Boundary Database (GBDB) together with the associated publication in Acta Materialia! The GBDB is the largest database of DFT-computed grain boundary properties to date, encompassing 327 GBs of 58 elemental metals. To construct the GBDB, we developed a novel scaled-structural template approach for GB calculations, which reduces the computational cost of converging GB structures by a factor of ~ 3–6. The grain boundary energies and work of separation have been rigorously validated against previous experimental and computational data.

You can check out the GBDB at Crystalium@Materials Virtual Lab or the Materials Project.

Our collaborative paper with the group of Zhiguo Xia in South China University of Technology on “Engineering of K3YSi2O7 To Tune Photoluminescence with Selected Activators and Site Occupancy” has been published in Chemistry of Materials. We have discovered the Eu- and Ce-activated K3YSi2O7 phosphors, which exhibit orange-red and green emission, respectively. Using DFT calculations, we show that Eu2+ occupies both K1 and Y2 crystallographic sites, while Ce3+ and Eu3+ only occupy the Y2 site. Hence, the broad-band red emission of Eu2+ are attributed to a small DFT band gap (3.69 eV) of K3YSi2O7 host and a selective occupancy of Eu2+ in a highly distorted K1 site and a high crystal field splitting around Y2 sites.

The Materials Virtual Lab is pleased to announce two newly minted PhD graduates – Dr Zhuoying Zhu and Dr Chen Zheng! Congratulations on their successful PhD thesis defense!

Both Zhuoying and Chen joined the group in 2014. They have taken radically different, but equally fruitful research paths over the course of their PhD career.

Zhuoying’s thesis work is on superionic conductors solid electrolytes for all-solid-state rechargeable alkali-ion batteries. Using computational methods, she has successfully predicted completely novel lithium and sodium superionic conductors with superior ionic conductivity and electrochemical stability, several of which have already been realized experimentally. Her work showcases how first principles computations, combined with the application of thermodynamics and kinetics, can help accelerate materials optimization and discovery for technological applications.

Chen’s thesis is focused on the relatively nascent field of machine learning (ML) in materials science. He has developed ML models that can interpret X-ray absorption spectra with accuracies exceeding that of humans, as well as applied graph-based deep learning techniques developed in our group to accelerate the exploration of vast compositional spaces for cathode materials.

In a collaboration with the Xie group from Xiamen, our group is pleased to announce yet another novel phosphor discovered via first-principles computations. Sr2AlSi2O6N:Eu2+ has a superbroad emission with a bandwidth of 230 nm, the broadest emission bandwidth ever reported, and has excellent thermal quenching resistance (88% intensity at 150°C). A prototype white LED utilizing only this full-visible-spectrum phosphor exhibits superior color quality (Ra = 97, R9 = 91), outperforming commercial tricolor phosphor-converted LEDs. This work is published in Chemistry of Materials and is co-authored by Shuxing Li of the Xie group with Materials Virtual Lab alumnus Zhenbin Wang.

Xingyu’s first paper titled “Water Contributes to Higher Energy Density and Cycling Stability of Prussian Blue Analogue Cathodes for Aqueous Sodium-Ion Batteries” is now published in Chemistry of Materials! In this work, we show that dry Prussian blue analogues (PBAs), one of the most promising cathode materials for aqueous sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy-storage systems, generally undergo a phase transition from a rhombohedral Na2PR(CN)6 to a tetragonal/cubic PR(CN)6 during Na extraction. However, the presence of water fundamentally alters this phsae behavior, increasing an increase in the average voltage and a reduction in volume change during electrochemical cycling, resulting in both higher energy density and better cycling stability. We also identified four new promising PBA compositions, Na2CoMn(CN)6, Na2NiMn(CN)6, Na2CuMn(CN)6 and Na2ZnMn(CN)6 for further exploration.

Zhi Deng is the lead author in our recently published work in npj Computational Materials on a machine-learned (ML) electrostatic Spectral Neighbor Analysis Potential (eSNAP) for Li3N, a prototypical superionic conductor. By incorporating long-ranged electrostatics, we developed a highly accurate eSNAP model for Li3N that far outperforms traditional potentials in the prediction of energies, forces and properties such as lattice constants, elastic constants, and phonon dispersion curves. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the eSNAP enables long-time, large-scale Li diffusion studies in Li3N, computing the Haven ratio and simulating GB diffusion in Li3N for the first time to excellent agreement with experimental values.

Our group members are also co-authors in several recently published works.

• Group alumnus Zhenbin Wang co-authored “Color Tunable Single-Phase Eu2+ and Ce3+ Co-Activated Sr2LiAlO4 Phosphors” published in Journal of Materials Chemistry C, a work that builds on the Sr2LiAlO4 phosphor previously discovered by our group using data mining and DFT computations to show that co-doping of Eu2+ and Ce3+ can be used to tune the color of the Sr2LiAlO4 phosphor.
• Zhuoying co-authored a work on “Elucidating the Limit of Li Insertion into the Spinel Li4Ti5O12” published in ACS Materials Letters. Our contribution is using DFT computations to identify the structures and voltage profile of LixTi5O12 when lithiated to Li8Ti5O12.
• Yiming and Hanmei are coauthors on a paper on “2DMatPedia, an Open Computational Database of Two-Dimensional Materials from Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches” published in Scientific Data.

We are pleased to announce that Richard’s follow-up work on the anisotropic work functions of the elements has been published in Surface Science. The work function is a fundamental electronic property of a solid that varies with the facets of a crystalline surface. It is a crucial parameter in spectroscopy as well as materials design, especially for technologies such as thermionic electron guns and Schottky barriers. In this work, we present the largest database of calculated work functions for elemental crystals to date. This well-validated database contains the anisotropic work functions of more than 100 polymorphs of about 72 elements. One significant advance is the development of an improved model for the work function of metals from atomic parameters such as the electronegativity and metallic radius based on Gauss’ law.

The work function database can be accessed at the Crystalium website together with other surface properties.