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The energy landscape of carbon is exceedingly complex, hosting diverse and important metastable phases, including diamond, fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene. Searching for structures, especially those with large unit cells, in this…
With few systems of technological interest having been studied as extensively as elemental silicon, there currently exists a wide disparity between the number of predicted low-energy silicon polymorphs and those, which have been…
Silicon materials play a key role in many technologically relevant fields, ranging from the electronic to the photovoltaic industry. A systematic search for silicon allotropes was performed by employing a modified ab initio minima hopping…
Novel extended networks of C8, Si8 and silicon carbide Si4C4 are proposed based on crystal chemistry rationale and optimized structures to ground state energies and derived physical properties within the density functional theory (DFT). The…
The widely used crystal structures for both heptazine-based and triazine-based two-dimensional (2D) graphitic carbon nitride (g-C$_3$N$_4$) are the flat P-6m2 configurations. However, the experimentally synthesized 2D g-C$_3$N$_4$ possess…
A prototypical organic photovoltaic material is a heterojunction composed of the blend of regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl-C$_{61}$-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM). Microscopic understanding of the energy…
Silicon in a cubic diamond structure currently plays a significant role in the photovoltaic industry. However, the intrinsic band structures of crystalline silicon restrict its sunlight conversion efficiency. Recently, a clathrate-like…
Point defect complexes in crystalline silicon composed of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms are studied within density-functional theory (DFT). Ab initio Random Structure Searching (AIRSS) is used to find low-energy defect structures. We…
Low-energy structures of alanates are currently known to be described by patterns of isolated, nearly ideal tetrahedral [AlH$_4$] anions and metal cations. We discover that the novel polymeric motif recently proposed for LiAlH$_4$ plays a…
The thriving area of synthetic carbon allotropes witnesses theoretic proposals and experimental syntheses of many new two-dimensional ultrathin structures, which are often achieved by careful arrangement of non-hexagon $\mathrm{sp^2}$…
We performed a systematic search for low-energy structures of binary iron silicide over a wide range of compositions using the crystal structure prediction method based on adaptive genetic algorithm. 36 structures with formation energies…
We perform density functional theory calculations using Gaussian atomic-orbital methods within the generalized gradient approximation for the exchange and correlation to study the interactions in the bare and hydrogenated platinum clusters.…
Using systematic evolutionary structure searching we propose a new carbon allotrope, phagraphene, standing for penta-hexa-hepta-graphene, because the structure is composed of 5-6-7 carbon rings. This two-dimensional (2D) carbon structure is…
Li2FeSiO4 is an important alternative cathode for next generation Li-ion batteries due to its high theoretical capacity (330 mA h/g). However, its development has faced significant challenges arising from structural complexity and poor…
Classical molecular-dynamics simulations have been carried out to investigate densification mechanisms in silicon dioxide thin films deposited on an amorphous silica surface, according to a simplified ion-beam assisted deposition (IBAD)…
We have used Low Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED) I-V analysis and ab initio calculations to quantitatively determine the honeycomb chain model structure for the Si(111)-3x2-Sm surface. This structure and a similar 3x1 recontruction have…
Context Mixed-metal clusters have long been studied because of their peculiar properties and how they change with cluster size, composition and charge state and their potential roles in catalysis. The characterization of these clusters is…
Potentially new, single-atom thick semiconducting 2D-graphene-like material, called Anisotropic-cyclicgraphene, have been generated by the two stage searching strategy linking molecular and ab initio approach. The candidate derived from the…
In 2015, a new two dimensional (2D) carbon allotrope, called phagraphene, was theoretically proposed. Based on this structure, we propose here a new boron nitride structure called phaBN. It is composed by three types of rings: pentagons,…
Nodal semimetals, materials systems with nodal-point or -line Fermi surfaces, are much sought after for their novel transport and topological properties. Identification of experimental materials candidates, however, has mainly relied on…