Defect-laden 2D Materials for a Sustainable Future – from CO2 conversion to single photon emission

Talat S. Rahman

Department of Physics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA

In the pursuit of a sustainable future, the last decade has seen a concerted effort in accelerating the discovery of materials for energy needs, thanks to the Materials Genome Initiative. In this talk I will focus on few 2-dimensional materials which have captured our imagination. As with graphene, another common lubricant, molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) shows remarkable potential for optoelectronic applications when peeled off as a single sheet. I will show how defects and dopants in single-layer MoS2 convert it into a cheap catalyst for CO hydrogenation1. Even more interesting is the case of another 2D material, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), a well-known insulator.  Defects can transform h-BN to a metal-free catalyst that captures and converts CO2 to value added products such as methanol2. Interestingly, defect-laden h-BN is also being sought as a single photon emitter akin to NV centers in diamond. With a focus on electronic structural modulations of the local environment, I will draw comparisons with experimental observations made in collaborative work.  

[1] D. Le, T. B. Rawal, and T. S. Rahman, J. Phys. Chem. C 118, 5346 (2014); T.B. Rawal, et al., J. Chem. Phys. 154, 174701 (2021).

[2] K. Chagoya, et al., ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 9, 2447 (2021); T. Jiang, et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 23, 7988 (2021).