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Conventional polymer additives have a substantial impact on synthetic inorganic chemistry, but critical shortcomings remain; for example, low solubility in organic solvents and potential thermodynamic aggregates. Poly(ionic liquid)s have now been used as efficient additives that enable a high level control of bismuth sulfide crystals with significant size and morphological diversities. The bismuth sulfides exhibit tunable band structure as a result of the quantum size effects. Moreover, poly(ionic liquid)s are able to couple with as-synthesized bismuth sulfides chemically and endow a modified surface electronic structure, which allows resultant products to possess outstanding electrocatalytic performance for water oxidation, although its commercial counterpart is catalytically inert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the band-gap and true band-gap are analyzed for the corrugated structures of various types of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) within the tight binding approximation. We show that corrugation, combined with curvature effect, yields naturally the true small band-gap in all SWCNTs with small radius. The more stable corrugated structures of SWCNTs are backed by the abinitio total energy calculations for nominally metallic armchair SWCNTs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using density function theory (DFT) implemented in VASP package, we find two new type of meta-crystals constructed by IV group elements: Si-568 and Ge-568. The calculational results show that Si-568 has a band gap of 0.09eV estimated by DFT, while Ge-568 behaves metallic. These two new types of nano-structures both can be created via experimentally observed di-vacancies (DVs) and Stone–Thrower–Wales (STW) defect. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Multiferroic materials are characterized by the coexistence of ferroelectric and ferromagnetic (or antiferromagnetic) orders, the coupling to lattice vibration can be invoked either through piezoelectric or piezomagnetic effects. In this paper, the polaritonic band structures of multiferroic superlattices composed of oppositely polarized domains are investigated using the generalized transfer matrix method. For the primitive cell with broken parity symmetry, the polaritonic band structure is asymmetrical with respect to the forward and backward propagation directions (nonreciprocality). In particular, the band extreme points move away from the Brillouin zone center. This asymmetry in band-gap positions and widths can be used to design compact one-way optical isolators, while the extremely slow light velocities near the asymmetrical upper edges of lower bands includes the essential ingredients for designing slow light devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]