Highly Durable Graphene Monolayer Electrode on Insulating Substrate under Long-term Hydrogen Evolution Cycling

Electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) at single graphene sheets has been investigated widely either in its pristine form or after chemical modification. One important challenge is the long-term stability of single graphene sheets on Si/SiO2 substrates under HER. Previous reports have found that due to stress developing under gas evolution, the sheets tend to break apart, with a very low lifetime limited to just a few cycles of HER. Here, we show through appropriate electrode preparation that it is possible to achieve highly durable single graphene electrodes on insulating substrates, which can survive several hundreds of HER cycles with virtually no damage to the sp2-carbon framework. Through systematic investigations including atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy and electroanalysis, we show that even after so many cycles, the sheet is physically intact and the electron transfer capability of the electrodes remain unaffected. This extremely high stability of a single atomic sheet of carbon, when combined with appropriate chemical modification strategies, will pave way for the realization of novel 2D electrocatalysts.

Co2O3/Co2N0.67 nanoparticles encased in honeycomb-like N, P, O-codoped carbon framework derived from corncob as efficient ORR electrocatalysts

We develop a honey-comb-like N, P-codoped carbon framework derived from corncob as efficient ORR electrocatalysts.

Efficient lithium-ion storage using a heterostructured porous carbon framework and its in situ transmission electron microscopy study

The unique 3D heterostructure can highly tolerate the volume expansion over repetitive charge/discharge of lithium-ion batteries, which has been demonstrated through in situ transmission electron microscopy.

A Simple Model of Ballistic Conduction in Multi-Lead Molecular Devices

A fully analytical model is presented for ballistic conduction in a multi-lead device that is based on a π-conjugated carbon framework attached to a single source lead and several sink leads. This source-and-multiple-sink potential (SMSP) model is rooted in the Ernzerhof source-and-sink potential (SSP) approach and specifies transmission in terms of combinations of structural polynomials based on the molecular graph. The simplicity of the model allows insight into many-lead devices in terms of constituent two-lead devices, description of conduction in the multi-lead device in terms of structural polynomials, molecular orbital channels, and selection rules for active and inert leads and orbitals. In the wide-band limit, transmission can be expressed entirely in terms of characteristic polynomials of vertex-deleted graphs. As limiting cases of maximum connection, complete symmetric devices (CSD) and complete bipartite symmetric devices (CBSD) are defined and solved analytically. These devices have vanishing lead-lead interference effects. Illustrative calculations of transmission curves for model small-molecule systems are presented and selection rules are identified.