Ballistic-aggregated Carbon Nanofoam in Target-side of Pulsed Laser Deposition for Energy Storage Applications.

In pulsed laser deposition, along the traditionally exploited deposition on the front-side of the plasma-plume, a coating forms on the surface of the target as well. For reproducibility, this residue is usually cleaned and discarded. Here we instead investigate the target-side coated materials and employ them as a binder-free supercapacitor electrode. The ballistic-aggregated, target-side nanofoam is compact and features a larger fraction of sp2-carbon, higher nitrogen content with higher graphitic-N and lower oxygen content with fewer COOH groups than that of diffusive-aggregated conventional nanofoams. They are highly hydrogenated graphite-like amorphous carbon and superhydrophilic. The resulting symmetric micro-supercapacitor delivers higher volumetric capacitance of 522 mF/cm3 at 100 mV/s and 104% retention after 10000 charge-discharge cycles over conventional nanofoam (215 mF/cm3 and 85% retention) with an areal capacitance of 134 µF/cm2 at 120 Hz and ultrafast frequency response. Utilizing the normally discarded target-side material can therefore enable high performing devices while reducing waste, cost and energy input per usable product. leading towards a greater sustainability on nanomaterials synthesis and deposition techniques.

Optical Anisotropy of Porphyrin Nanocrystals Modified by the Electrochemical Dissolution.

Reflectance anisotropy spectroscopy (RAS) coupled to an electrochemical cell represents a powerful tool to correlate changes in the surface optical anisotropy to changes in the electrochemical currents related to electrochemical reactions. The high sensitivity of RAS in the range of the absorption bands of organic systems, such as porphyrins, allows us to directly correlate the variations of the optical anisotropy signal to modifications in the solid-state aggregation of the porphyrin molecules. By combining in situ RAS to electrochemical techniques, we studied the case of vacuum-deposited porphyrin nanocrystals, which have been recently observed dissolving through electrochemical oxidation in diluted sulfuric acid. Specifically, we could identify the first stages of the morphological modifications of the nanocrystals, which we could attribute to the single-electron transfers involved in the oxidation reaction; in this sense, the simultaneous variation of the optical anisotropy with the electron transfer acts as a precursor of the dissolution process of porphyrin nanocrystals.

Ordered assembly of non-planar vanadyl-tetraphenylporphyrins on ultra-thin iron oxide.

Stabilizing ordered assemblies of molecules represents the first step towards the construction of molecular devices featuring hybrid (organic-inorganic) interfaces where molecules can be easily functionalized in view of specific applications. Molecular layers of planar metal-tetraphenylporphyrins (MTPP) grown on an ultrathin iron oxide [namely Fe(001)-p(1 × 1)O] show indeed a high degree of structural order. The generality of such a picture is tested by exploiting non-planar porphyrins, such as vanadyl-TPP (VOTPP). These molecules feature a VO2+ ion in their center, with the O atom protruding out of the plane of the porphyrin ring. In this work, by employing diffraction, photoemission and X-ray absorption, we prove that non-planar VOTPP can nevertheless form a square and ordered superstructure, where porphyrin molecules lie flat with respect to the underlying substrate. Ab initio density functional theory simulations are used to elucidate the VO bond orientation with respect to the iron substrate.