Quantum-chemical simulation of impurity-induced trapping of a hole: (Li)0centre in MgO

Theoretical modeling of charge trapping in crystalline and amorphous Al2O3

The characteristics of intrinsic electron and hole trapping in crystalline and amorphous Al₂O₃ have been studied using density functional theory (DFT). Special attention was paid to enforcing the piece-wise linearity of the total energy with respect to electron number through the use of a range separated, hybrid functional PBE0-TC-LRC (Guidon et al 2009 J. Chem. Theory Comput. 5 3010) in order to accurately model the behaviour of localized states. The tuned functional is shown to reproduce the geometric and electronic structures of the perfect crystal as well as the spectroscopic characteristics of Mg_Al hole centre in corundum α-Al₂O₃. An ensemble of ten amorphous Al₂O₃ structures was generated using classical molecular dynamics and a melt and quench method and their structural characteristics compared with the experimental data. The electronic structure of amorphous systems was characterized using the inverse participation ratio method. Electrons and holes were then introduced into both crystalline and amorphous alumina structures and their properties calculated. Holes are shown to trap spontaneously in both crystalline and amorphous alumina. In the crystalline phase they localize on single O ion with the trapping energy of 0.38 eV. In amorphous phase, holes localize on two nearest neighbour oxygen sites with an average trapping energy of 1.26 eV, with hole trapping sites separated on average by about 8.0 Å. No electron trapping is observed in the material. Our results suggest that trapping of positive charge can be much more severe and stable in amorphous alumina rather than in crystalline samples.

Computational approaches to the determination of active site structures and reaction mechanisms in heterogeneous catalysts

We apply quantum chemical methods to the study of active site structures and reaction mechanisms in mesoporous silica and metal oxide catalysts. Our approach is based on the use of both molecular cluster and embedded cluster (QM/MM) techniques, where the active site and molecular complex are described using density functional theory (DFT) and the embedding matrix simulated by shell model potentials. We consider three case studies: alkene epoxidation over the microporous TS-1 catalyst; methanol synthesis on ZnO and Cu/ZnO and C-H bond activation over Li-doped MgO.

A combined molecular dynamics+quantum mechanics method for investigation of dynamic effects on local surface structures

A combined molecular dynamics (MD)+quantum mechanics (QM) method for studying processes on ionic surfaces is presented. Through the combination of classical MD and ab initio embedded-cluster calculations, this method allows the modeling of surface processes involving both the structural and dynamic features of the substrate, even for large-scale systems. The embedding approach used to link the information from the MD simulation to the cluster calculation is presented, and rigorous tests have been carried out to ensure the feasibility of the method. The electrostatic potential and electron density resulting from our embedded-cluster model have been compared with periodic slab results, and confirm the satisfying quality of our embedding scheme as well as the importance of applying embedding in our combined MD+QM approach. We show that a highly accurate representation of the Madelung potential becomes a prerequisite when the embedded-cluster approach is applied to temperature-distorted surface snapshots from the MD simulation.