Latticed-Confined Conversion Chemistry of Battery Electrode.

The electrochemical conversion reaction, usually featured by multiple redox processes and high specific capacity, holds great promise in developing high-energy rechargeable battery technologies. However, the complete structural change accompanied by spontaneous atomic migration and volume variation during the charge/discharge cycle leads to electrode disintegration and performance degradation, therefore severely restricting the application of conventional conversion-type electrodes. Herein, latticed-confined conversion chemistry is proposed, where the "intercalation-like" redox behavior is realized on the electrode with a "conversion-like" high capacity. By delicately formulating the high-entropy compounds, the pristine crystal structure can be preserved by the inert lattice framework, thus enabling an ultra-high initial Coulombic efficiency of 92.5% and a long cycling lifespan over a thousand cycles after the quasistatic charge-discharge cycle. This lattice-confined conversion chemistry unfolds a ubiquitous insight into the localized redox reaction and sheds light on developing high-performance electrodes toward next-generation high-energy rechargeable batteries.

The Systematic Impact of Personal Characteristics on Entrepreneurial Intentions of Engineering Students.

The impact of personal characteristics on entrepreneurial intention is a classic topic in the field of entrepreneurship research. Previous research mostly used simple linear models, leading to a gap in the study on the interrelationship among personal characteristics and their systematic influence on entrepreneurial intention. This study investigates the interrelationship among the four specific entrepreneurial characteristics (i.e., need for achievement, locus of control, risk-taking propensity, and creativity) and their systematic influence on the entrepreneurial intention of engineering students. The research data is from 210 engineering students via a survey. Logistic regression and path analysis were used for data analysis. The findings suggest that creativity and risk-taking directly influence entrepreneurial intention while the need for achievement and the locus of control influence it indirectly. Implications for entrepreneurship education are finally discussed.

Theoretical study of the source-drain current and gate leakage current to understand the graphene field-effect transistors.

We designed acene molecules attached to two semi-infinite metallic electrodes to explore the source-drain current of graphene and the gate leakage current of the gate dielectric material in the field-effect transistors (FETs) device using the first-principles density functional theory combined with the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism. In the acene-based molecular junctions, we modify the connection position of the thiol group at one side, forming different electron transport routes. The electron transport routes besides the shortest one are defined as the cross channels. The simulation results indicate that electron transport through the cross channels is as efficient as that through the shortest one, since the conductance is weakly dependent on the distance. Thus, it is possible to connect the graphene with multiple leads, leading the graphene as a channel utilized in the graphene-based FETs in the mesoscopic system. When the conjugation of the cross channel is blocked, the junction conductance decreases dramatically. The differential conductance of the BA-1 is nearly 7 (54.57 µS) times as large as that of the BA-4 (7.35 µS) at zero bias. Therefore, the blocked graphene can be employed as the gate dielectric material in the top-gated graphene FET device, since the leakage current is small. The graphene-based field-effect transistors fabricated with a single layer of graphene as the channel and the blocked graphene as the gate dielectric material represent one way to overcome the problem of miniaturization which faces the new generation of transistors.

Nonequilibrium Green's function study on the electronic structure and transportation behavior of the conjugated molecular junction: terminal connections and intramolecular connections.

In the recent density functional-based calculations, it was found that the conductivity of naphthalene molecular wires can be modulated by altering the linking position of the molecule to the electrode [D. Walter, D. Neuhauser, and R. Baer, Chem. Phys. 299, 139 (2004)]. A quantum interference model was proposed to interpret the observation. In this paper, we further studied the conductance of a series of conjugated molecules containing aromatic rings using density functional theory combined with nonequilibrium Green's function method. For polyacene systems with different terminal connections, the conductivity is dependent on the substitution position of anchoring groups even with similar electron transport distance. The conductance of trans-substitution can be ten times or more as large as that of the cis-substitution. However, for the biphenyl system with different intramolecular connections, adding more connections between two benzene rings does not change the junction conductance. All these results indicate that the junction conductance is strongly dependent on the particular electron transport pathway. The alternating double-single linkage is the most probable one, since others are impeded by the single bonds.