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Germanium Fluorides

Our recent work on Germanium Fluoride nanocages was accepted by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In this work, we studied with DFT a series of high-symmetry molecules with Formula GenFn, where n is between six and sixty. The molecules we studied show optical transparency or semi-transparency, electron delocalization, LUMO energies below -4 eV, and gaps in the range 1.6-3.2 eV. Although the formation energies are high, the fullerene-like systems have isomers with lower ground-state energies, where some Fluorine atoms are located inside the cages. So the fullerene below could undergo a transformation with F atoms preferring to be inside; but the barrier for such a transition should be very high. Link https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.8b11259

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2d Silicon Hybrid Material

I noticed an article on a new 2d sheet combining silicon, nitrogen, and boron. It’s another honeycomb-shaped system, challenging the almighty graphene When I first read the news article I thought this had been synthesized, which would’ve been really nice. But at this point the work is only computational, but it’s still quite interesting. There are so many candidates for 2d semiconductors out there… makes me think, which one will be the king? Link