RESUMO
Tailored material is necessary in many industrial applications since material properties directly determine the characteristics of components. However, the conventional trial and error approach is costly and time-consuming. Therefore, materials informatics is expected to overcome these drawbacks. Here, we show a new materials informatics approach applying the Ising model for solving discrete combinatorial optimization problems. In this study, the composition of the composite, aimed at developing a heat sink with three necessary properties: high thermal dissipation, attachability to Si, and a low weight, is optimized. We formulate an energy function equation concerning three objective terms with regard to the thermal conductivity, thermal expansion and specific gravity, with the composition variable and two constrained terms with a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization style equivalent to the Ising model and calculated by a simulated annealing algorithm. The composite properties of the composition selected from ten constituents are verified by the empirical mixture rule of the composite. As a result, an optimized composition with high thermal conductivity, thermal expansion close to that of Si, and a low specific gravity is acquired.
RESUMO
The valence band (VB) electronic structure and VB alignments at heterointerfaces of strained epitaxial stannate ASnO3 (A=Ca, Sr, and Ba) thin films are characterized using in situ X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopies, with band gaps evaluated using spectroscopic ellipsometry. Scanning transmission electron microscopy with geometric phase analysis is used to resolve strain at atomic resolution. The VB electronic structure is strain state dependent in a manner that correlated with a directional change in Sn-O bond lengths with strain. However, VB offsets are found not to vary significantly with strain, which resulted in ascribing most of the difference in band alignment, due to a change in the band gaps with strain, to the conduction band edge. Our results reveal significant strain tuning of conduction band offsets using epitaxial buffer layers, with strain-induced offset differences as large as 0.6 eV possible for SrSnO3. Such large conduction band offset tunability through elastic strain control may provide a pathway to minimize the loss of charge confinement in 2-dimensional electron gases and enhance the performance of photoelectrochemical stannate-based devices.
RESUMO
The artificial photosynthesis technology known as the Honda-Fujishima effect, which produces oxygen and hydrogen or organic energy from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, is an effective energy and environmental technology. The key component for the higher efficiency of this reaction system is the anode electrode, generally composed of a photocatalyst formed on a glass substrate from electrically conductive fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO). To obtain a highly efficient electrode, a dense film composed of a nanoparticulate visible light responsive photocatalyst that usually has a complicated multi-element composition needs to be deposited and adhered onto the FTO. In this study, we discovered a method for controlling the electronic structure of a film by controlling the aerosol-type nanoparticle deposition (NPD) condition and thereby forming films of materials with a band gap smaller than that of the prepared raw material powder, and we succeeded in extracting a higher current from the anode electrode. As a result, we confirmed that a current approximately 100 times larger than those produced by conventional processes could be obtained using the same material. This effect can be expected not only from the materials discussed (GaN-ZnO) in this paper but also from any photocatalyst, particularly materials of solid solution compositions.