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Electrides have emerged as promising materials with exotic properties due to the presence of localized electrons detached from all atoms. Despite the continuous discovery of many new electrides, most of them are based on atypical compositions, and their applications require an inert surface structure to passivate reactive excess electrons. Here, we demonstrate a different route to attain tunable electrides. We first report that monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) exhibit weak electride characteristics, which is the remainder of the electride feature of the transition metal sublattice. By introducing chalcogen vacancies, the enhanced electride characteristics are comparable to those of known electrides. Since the precise tailoring of the chalcogen vacancy concentration has been achieved experimentally, we proposed that TMDCs can be used to build electrides with controllable intensities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the electride states at the chalcogen vacancy of monolayer TMDCs will play an important role in catalyzing hydrogen evolution reactions.
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Counting Electrons in Electrides
The selection and design of charge integration methods remain an outstanding challenge in materials chemistry. In complex materials like electrides, this challenge is amplified by the small charge and complex shape of electride wave functions. For these reasons, popular integration methods, such as the Bader method, usually fail to assign any charge to the bare electrons in an electride. To address this challenge, we developed an algorithm that instead partitions the charge based on the electron localization function (ELF), a popular scheme for visualizing chemically important features in molecules and solids. The algorithm uses Bader segmentation of the ELF to find the electride electrons and Voronoi segmentation of the ELF to identify atoms. We apply this method, “BadELF”, to the quantification of atomic radii and oxidation states in both ionic compounds and electrides. For ionic compounds, we find that the BadELF method yields radii that agree closely with Shannon crystal radii, while the oxidation states agree closely with the Bader method. When they are applied to electrides, however, only the BadELF algorithm yields chemically meaningful charges. We argue that the BadELF method provides a useful strategy to identify electrides and obtain new insight into their most essential property: the quantity of electrons within them.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1905294
- PAR ID:
- 10478752
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Chemical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the American Chemical Society
- Volume:
- 145
- Issue:
- 48
- ISSN:
- 0002-7863
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 26472 to 26476
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.3c10876
