Functionalized Silicon Electrodes Toward Electrostatic Catalysis

Abstract

Oriented external electric fields are now emerging as “smart effectors” of chemical changes. The key challenges in experimentally studying electrostatic catalysis are (i) controlling the orientation of fields along the reaction axis and (ii) finely adjusting the magnitudes of electrostatic stimuli. Surface models provide a versatile platform for addressing the direction of electric fields with respect to reactants and balancing the trade-off between the solubility of charged species and the intensity of electric fields. In this mini-review, we present the recent advances that have been investigated of the electrostatic effect on the chemical reaction on the monolayer-functionalized silicon surfaces. We mainly focus on elucidating the mediator/catalysis role of static electric fields induced from either solid/liquid electric double layers at electrode/electrolyte interfaces or space charges in the semiconductors, indicating the electrostatic aspects is of great significance in the semiconductor electrochemistry, redox electroactivity, and chemical bonding. Herein, the functionalization of silicon surfaces allows scientists to explore electrostatic catalysis from nanoscale to mesoscale; most importantly, it provides glimpses of the wide-ranging potentials of oriented electric fields for switching on/off the macroscale synthetic organic electrochemistry and living radical polymerization.

Strong Photocurrent from Solution‐Processed Ruddlesden–Popper 2D Perovskite–MoS2 Hybrid Heterojunctions

“…In these photodetectors different HTMs such as few-layer MoS 2 or graphene are introduced in the planar device configuration to make interface with perovskite film whereas rGO is blended as ETM with the 3D perovskite. [37] Among many 2D inorganic materials, MoS 2 (mono to few layer) has potential to serve as an ETL, [38] HTL [39] as well as buffer layer (BL), [40,41] because of its tunable bandgap from 1.2 to 1.8 eV, [42,43] which can be achieved by adjusting the number of layers. Moreover, few-layer MoS 2 offers fast transport of charge carriers in vertical direction, [44] fewer traps as it has no dangling bonds on the surface, [38] high carrier mobility of nearly 500 cm 2 V −1 s −1 [45] which makes them a potential charge transport material for optoelectronic applications.…”

Oriented External Electric Fields Regurating the Reaction Mechanism of CH4 Oxidation Catalyzed by Fe(IV)-Oxo-Corrolazine: Insight from Density Functional Calculations

“…Recently, Sason Shaik et al ( Hirao et al, 2008 ; Gorin et al, 2012 ; Fried and Boxer, 2015 ; Li et al, 2015 ; Akamatsu et al, 2017 ; Che et al, 2018 ; Ciampi et al, 2018 ; He et al, 2018 ; Yu and Coote, 2019 ; Shaik et al, 2020 ; Shaik et al, 2004b ; Kraskov et al, 2021 ; Yu et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ; de Visser et al, 2022 ) found that oriented external electric fields (OEEFs) can be used as a new type of catalyst to catalyze reactions by stabilizing transition states through the interactions between OEEFs and the molecular dipole moments, and even can increase the selectivity of reactions through adjusting the direction of OEEFs. Through theoretical calculations, our group also found that the OEEFs can modulate the reaction process through the interactions with the dipole moment of the reaction molecules ( Wang et al, 2019 ).…”