van der Waals heterostructures (vdWH) are ideal systems for exploring light-matter interactions at the atomic scale. In particular, structures with a type-II band alignment can yield detailed insight into carrier-photon conversion processes, which are central to, for example, solar cells and light-emitting diodes. An important first step in describing such processes is to obtain the energies of the interlayer exciton states existing at the interface. Here we present a general first-principles method to compute the electronic quasi-particle (QP) band structure and excitonic binding energies of incommensurate vdWHs. The method combines our quantum electrostatic heterostructure (QEH) model for obtaining the dielectric function with the many-body GW approximation and a generalized 2D Mott-Wannier exciton model. We calculate the level alignment together with intra- and interlayer exciton binding energies of bilayer MoS/WSe with and without intercalated hBN layers, finding excellent agreement with experimental photoluminescence spectra. A comparison to density functional theory calculations demonstrates the crucial role of self-energy and electron-hole interaction effects.

Big data and artificial intelligence has revolutionized science in almost every field – from economics to physics. In the area of materials science and computational heterogeneous catalysis, this revolution has led to the development of scientific data repositories, as well as data mining and machine learning tools to investigate the vast materials space. The goal of using these tools is to establish a deeper understanding of the relations between materials properties and activity, selectivity and stability – the important figures of merit in catalysis. Based on these insights, catalyst design principles can be established, which hopefully lead us to discover highly efficient catalysts to solve pressing issues for a sustainable future and the synthesis of highly functional materials, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The inherent complexity of catalytic reactions quests for machine learning methods to efficiently navigate through the high‐dimensional hyper‐surfaces in structure optimization problems to determine relevant chemical structures and transition states. In this review, we show how cutting edge data infrastructures and machine learning methods are being used to address problems in computational heterogeneous catalysis.

We present a new open repository for chemical reactions on catalytic surfaces, available at https://www.catalysis-hub.org . The featured database for surface reactions contains more than 100,000 chemisorption and reaction energies obtained from electronic structure calculations, and is continuously being updated with new datasets. In addition to providing quantum-mechanical results for a broad range of reactions and surfaces from different publications, the database features a systematic, large-scale study of chemical adsorption and hydrogenation on bimetallic alloy surfaces. The database contains reaction specific information, such as the surface composition and reaction energy for each reaction, as well as the surface geometries and calculational parameters, essential for data reproducibility. By providing direct access via the web-interface as well as a Python API, we seek to accelerate the discovery of catalytic materials for sustainable energy applications by enabling researchers to efficiently use the data as a basis for new calculations and model generation.

The idea of combining different two-dimensional (2D) crystals in van der Waals heterostructures (vdWHs) has led to a new paradigm for band structure engineering with atomic precision. Due to the weak interlayer couplings, the band structures of the individual 2D crystals are largely preserved upon formation of the heterostructure. However, regardless of the details of the interlayer hybridisation, the size of the 2D crystal band gaps are always reduced due to the enhanced dielectric screening provided by the surrounding layers. The effect can be on the order of electron volts, but its precise magnitude is non-trivial to predict because of the non-local nature of the screening in quasi-2D materials, and it is not captured by effective single-particle methods such as density functional theory. Here we present an efficient and general method for calculating the band gap renormalization of a 2D material embedded in an arbitrary vdWH. The method evaluates the change in the GW self-energy of the 2D material from the change in the screened Coulomb interaction. The latter is obtained using the quantum-electrostatic heterostructure (QEH) model. We benchmark the G∆W method against full first-principles GW calculations and use it to unravel the importance of screening-induced band structure renormalisation in various vdWHs. A main result is the observation that the size of the band gap reduction of a given 2D material when inserted into a heterostructure scales inversely with the polarisability of the 2D material. Our work demonstrates that dielectric engineering via van der Waals heterostructuring represents a promising strategy for tailoring the band structure of 2D materials. arXiv:1703.03188v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Excitons and plasmons are the two most fundamental types of collective electronic excitations occurring in solids. Traditionally, they have been studied separately using bulk techniques that probe their average energetic structure over large spatial regions. However, as the dimensions of materials and devices continue to shrink, it becomes crucial to understand how these excitations depend on local variations in the crystal-and chemical structure on the atomic scale. Here, we use monochromated low-loss scanning-transmission-electron-microscopy electron-energy-loss spectroscopy, providing the best simultaneous energy and spatial resolution achieved to-date to unravel the full set of electronic excitations in few-layer MoS 2 nanosheets over a wide energy range. Using first-principles, many-body calculations we confirm the excitonic nature of the peaks at~2 and~3 eV in the experimental electron-energy-loss spectrum and the plasmonic nature of higher energy-loss peaks. We also rationalise the non-trivial dependence of the electron-energy-loss spectrum on beam and sample geometry such as the number of atomic layers and distance to steps and edges. Moreover, we show that the excitonic features are dominated by the long wavelength (q = 0) components of the probing field, while the plasmonic features are sensitive to a much broader range of q-vectors, indicating a qualitative difference in the spatial character of the two types of collective excitations. Our work provides a template protocol for mapping the local nature of electronic excitations that open new possibilities for studying photo-absorption and energy transfer processes on a nanometer scale.

The discovery of high-performing and stable materials for sustainable energy applications is a pressing goal in catalysis and materials science. Understanding the relationship between a material's structure and functionality is an important step in the process, such that viable polymorphs for a given chemical composition need to be identified. Machine-learning based surrogate models have the potential to accelerate the search for polymorphs that target specific applications. Herein, we report a readily generalizable active-learning (AL) accelerated algorithm for identification of electrochemically stable iridium-oxide polymorphs of IrO 2 and IrO 3 . The search is coupled to a subsequent analysis of the electrochemical stability of the discovered structures for the acidic oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Structural candidates are generated by identifying all 956 structurally unique AB 2 and AB 3 prototypes in existing materials databases (more than 38,000). Next, using an active learning approach we are able to find 196 IrO 2 polymorphs within the thermodynamic amorphous synthesizability limit and reaffirm the global stability of the rutile structure. We find 75 synthesizable IrO 3 polymorphs and report a previously unknown FeF 3 -type structure as the most stable, termed α-IrO 3 . To test the algorithms performance, we compare to a random search of the candidate space and report at least a twofold increase in the rate of discovery. Additionally, the AL approach can acquire the most stable polymorphs of IrO 2 and IrO 3 with less than 30 density functional theory optimizations. Analysis of the structural properties of the discovered polymorphs reveals that octahedral local coordination environments are preferred for nearly all low energy structures. Subsequent Pourbaix Ir-H 2 O analysis shows that α-IrO 3 is the globally stable solid phase under acidic OER conditions and supersedes the stability of rutile IrO 2 . Calculation of theoretical OER surface activities reveal ideal weaker binding of the OER intermediates on α-IrO 3 than on any other considered iridium-oxide. We emphasize that the proposed AL algorithm can be easily generalized to search for any binary metal-oxide structure with a defined stoichiometry.

A comprehensive database of chemical properties on a vast set of transition metal surfaces has the potential to accelerate the discovery of novel catalytic materials for energy and industrial applications. In this data descriptor, we present such an extensive study of chemisorption properties of important adsorbates - e.g., C, O, N, H, S, CH x , OH, NH, and S H - on 2,035 bimetallic alloy surfaces in 5 different stoichiometric ratios, i.e., 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. To our knowledge, it is the first systematic study to compile the adsorption properties of such a well-defined, large chemical space of catalytic interest. We propose that a collection of catalytic properties of this magnitude can assist with the development of machine learning enabled surrogate models in theoretical catalysis research to design robust catalysts with high activity for challenging chemical transformations. This database is made publicly available through the platform www.Catalysis-hub.org for easy retrieval of the data for further scientific analysis.

Calculating the quasiparticle (QP) band structure of two-dimensional (2D) materials within the GW self-energy approximation has proven to be a rather demanding computational task. The main reason is the strong q-dependence of the 2D dielectric function around q = 0 that calls for a much denser sampling of the Brillouin zone than is necessary for similar 3D solids. Here we use an analytical expression for the small q-limit of the 2D response function to perform the BZ integral over the critical region around q = 0. This drastically reduces the requirements on the q-point mesh and implies a significant computational speed-up. For example, in the case of monolayer MoS2, convergence of the G0W0 band gap to within ∼ 0.1 eV is achieved with 12 × 12 q-points rather than the 36×36 mesh required with discrete BZ sampling techniques. We perform a critical assessment of the band gap of the three prototypical 2D semiconductors MoS2, hBN, and phosphorene including the effect of self-consistency at the GW0 and GW level. The method is implemented in the open source GPAW code.