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Abstract Isotopes of heavier gases including carbon ( 13 C/ 14 C), nitrogen ( 13 N), and oxygen ( 18 O) are highly important because they can be substituted for naturally occurring atoms without significantly perturbing the biochemical properties of the radiolabelled parent molecules. These labelled molecules are employed in clinical radiopharmaceuticals, in studies of brain disease and as imaging probes for advanced medical imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomography (PET). Established distillation-based isotope gas separation methods have a separation factor ( S ) below 1.05 and incur very high operating costs due to high energy consumption and long processing times, highlighting the need for new separation technologies. Here, we show a rapid and highly selective adsorption-based separation of 18 O 2 from 16 O 2 with S above 60 using nanoporous adsorbents operating near the boiling point of methane (112 K), which is accessible through cryogenic liquefied-natural-gas technology. A collective-nuclear-quantum effect difference between the ordered 18 O 2 and 16 O 2 molecular assemblies confined in subnanometer pores can explain the observed equilibrium separation and is applicable to other isotopic gases. 

We have developed an accurate and efficient deep-learning potential (DP) for graphane, which is a fully hydrogenated version of graphene, using a very small training set consisting of 1000 snapshots from a 0.5 ps density functional theory (DFT) molecular dynamics simulation at 1000 K. We have assessed the ability of the DP to extrapolate to system sizes, temperatures, and lattice strains not included in the training set. The DP performs surprisingly well, outperforming an empirical many-body potential when compared with DFT data for the phonon density of states, thermodynamic properties, velocity autocorrelation function, and stress–strain curve up to the yield point. This indicates that our DP can reliably extrapolate beyond the limit of the training data. We have computed the thermal fluctuations as a function of system size for graphane. We found that graphane has larger thermal fluctuations compared with graphene, but having about the same out-of-plane stiffness.