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Several studies have reported a dramatically increased oxygen storage capacity (OSC) for small ceria nanoparticles (∼5 nm). Both experiments and theory have correlated this effect with superoxide ion formation. In previous studies, density functional theory (DFT) calculations with the PBE+Udensity functional have been used, and the obtained results were only in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations. One severe problem is the underbinding of the O2molecule upon superoxide ion formation, which suggests that such species should not exist above room temperature. In this work, we use hybrid DFT functional to resolve this problem. We find that the discrepancy between theory and experiment originates from an incorrect estimate of the energy associated with the localized f-electrons with respect to the oxygen p-levels. By using average O2adsorption energies from hybrid DFT calculations, extrapolated to large nanoparticles (3−10 nm), in conjunction with first-order desorption kinetics, we find that superoxide ions are indeed stable on nanosized ceria well above room temperature, in accordance with experiments.

Ion migration has recently been suggested to play critical roles in the operation of lead halide perovskite solar cells. However, so far there has been no systematic investigation of how the monovalent cation affects the vacancy formation, ion migration and the associated hysteresis effect. Here, we present density functional theory calculations on all possible ion migration barriers in the perovskite materials with different cations i.e. CH3NH3PbI3, CH(NH2)2PbI3and CsPbI3in the tetragonal phase and investigate vacancy monovalent-cation interactions within the framework of the possible ion migrations. The most relevant ion movement (iodide) is investigated in greater detail and corresponding local structural changes, the relationships with the local ionic dielectric response, Stark effect and current-voltage hysteresis are discussed. We observe a correlation between the energy barrier for iodine migration and the magnitude of the dipole of the monovalent cation. From the data, we suggest a vacancy-dipole interaction mechanism by which the larger dipole of the monovalent cation can respond to and screen the local electric fields more effectively. The stronger response of the high dipolar monovalent cation to the vacancy electrostatic potential in turn leads to a lower local structural changes within the neighbouring octahedra. The presented data reveal a detailed picture of the ion movement, vacancy dipole interactions and the consequent local structural changes, which contain fundamental information about the photo-physics, and dielectric response of the material.