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A non-fluorescent naphthalene diimide (NDI) dimer, conjugating red and blue NDI dyes, becomes red/NIR emitting upon G-quadruplex binding. The fluorescence lifetime which is significantly different for the complexes, the G-quadruplex/dimer and the weakly emitting ds-DNA/dimer is the key feature for the development of new rationally engineered G-quadruplex sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) application programming interface (API) empowers users with holistic access to a growing federation of databases, enhancing the accessibility and discoverability of materials and chemical data. Since the first release of the OPTIMADE specification (v1.0), the API has undergone significant development, leading to the v1.2 release, and has underpinned multiple scientific studies. In this work, we highlight the latest features of the API format, accompanying software tools, and provide an update on the implementation of OPTIMADE in contributing materials databases. We end by providing several use cases that demonstrate the utility of the OPTIMADE API in materials research that continue to drive its ongoing development., Competing Interests: G. J. C. is a shareholder and Director of Intellegens Ltd. G.-M. R. is a shareholder and Chief Innovation Officer of Matgenix SRL. E. B. is a shareholder and Director of Materials Platform for Data Science OÜ., (This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry.)

We investigate a family of free-standing quasi-two-dimensional silicon structures based on a planar square bilayer with adatom decorations. When attached to the bilayer, these adatoms form local reconstructions which resemble either a bishop's hat or elongated square bipyramids. We systematically constructed members of this family via exhaustive enumeration and then studied them using tight-binding and density-functional theory. We find that this geometry contributes significantly to the stability of the resulting structures, with some squared bilayers energetically more stable than the honeycomb bilayers. The most interesting phases were then characterized in more detail, and they all turned out metallic. Finally, we propose the [100] surface of ZrO2 as the most suitable substrate for the synthesis of these two-dimensional phases.

Metallization and dissociation are key transformations in diatomic molecules at high densities particularly significant for modeling giant planets. Using X-ray absorption spectroscopy and atomistic modeling, we demonstrate that in halogens, the formation of a connected molecular structure takes place at pressures well below metallization. Here we show that the iodine diatomic molecule first elongates by ∼0.007 Å up to a critical pressure of Pc ∼ 7 GPa, developing bonds between molecules. Then its length continuously decreases with pressure up to 15-20 GPa. Universal trends in halogens are shown and allow us to predict for chlorine a pressure of 42 ± 8 GPa for molecular bond-length reversal. Our findings contribute to tackling the molecule invariability paradigm in diatomic molecular phases at high pressures and may be generalized to other abundant diatomic molecules in the universe, including hydrogen.

The semimetallic bandstructure of graphene and silicene limit their use in functional devices. Mixing silicon and carbon offers a rather unexplored pathway to build semiconducting sheets compatible with current Si-based electronics. We present here a complete theoretical study of the phase diagram of two-dimensional silicon-carbon binaries. To scan the composition range, we employ an ab initio global structural prediction method, complemented by exhaustive enumeration of two-dimensional structure prototypes. We find a wealth of two-dimensional low-energy structures, from standard honeycomb single- and double-layers, passing by dumbbell geometries, to carbon nanosheets bridged by Si atoms. Many of these phases depart from planarity, either through buckling, or by germinating three-dimensional networks with a mixture of sp2 and sp3 bonds. We further characterize the most interesting crystal structures, unveiling a large variety of electronic properties, that could be exploited to develop high-performance electronic devices at the nanoscale.

The zinc blende (γ) phase of copper iodide holds the record hole conductivity for intrinsic transparent p-type semiconductors. In this work, we employ a high-throughput approach to systematically explore strategies for enhancing γ-CuI further by impurity incorporation. Our objectives are not only to find a practical approach to increase the hole conductivity in CuI thin films, but also to explore the possibility for ambivalent doping. In total 64 chemical elements were investigated as possible substitutionals on either the copper or the iodine site. All chalcogen elements were found to display acceptor character when substituting iodine, with sulfur and selenium significantly enhancing carrier concentrations produced by the native V Cu defects under conditions most favorable for impurity incorporation. Furthermore, eight impurities suitable for n-type doping were discovered. Unfortunately, our work also reveals that donor doping is hindered by compensating native defects, making ambipolar doping unlikely. Finally, we investigated how the presence of impurities influences the optical properties. In the majority of the interesting cases, we found no deep states in the band-gap, showing that CuI remains transparent upon doping.

We present simulations of the collapse under hydrostatic pressure of carbon nanotubes containing either water or carbon dioxide. We show that the molecules inside the tube alter the dynamics of the collapse process, providing either mechanical support and increasing the collapse pressure, or reducing mechanical stability. At the same time the nanotube acts as a nanoanvil, and the confinement leads to the nanostructuring of the molecules inside the collapsed tube. In this way, depending on the pressure and on the concentration of water or carbon dioxide inside the nanotube, we observe the formation of 1D molecular chains, 2D nanoribbons, and even molecular single and multi-walled nanotubes. The structure of the encapsulated molecules correlates with the mechanical response of the nanotube, opening up opportunities for the development of new devices or composite materials. Our analysis is quite general and it can be extended to other molecules in carbon nanotube nanoanvils, providing a strategy to obtain a variety of nano-objects with controlled features.

Barium silicides are versatile materials that have attracted attention for a variety of applications in electronics and optoelectronics. Using an unbiased structural search based on a particle-swarm optimization algorithm combined with density functional theory calculations, we investigate systematically the ground-state phase stability and the structural diversity of Ba-Si binaries under high pressure. The phase diagram turns out to be quite intricate, with several compositions stabilizing/destabilizing as a function of pressure. In particular, we identify novel phases of BaSi, BaSi2, BaSi3, and BaSi5 that might be synthesizable experimentally over a wide range of pressures. Our results not only clarify and complete the previously known structural phase diagram, but also provide new insights for understanding the Ba-Si binary system.

Multi-walled nanotube (MWNT) functionalisation was investigated by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The MWNTs were deposited as dilute dispersions on SERS-active substrates. We used nano-structured gold surfaces with various morphologies for our measurements. The surface enhancement effect was used to amplify the Raman signal from functional molecules bound to the nanotube walls. The recorded spectral features allowed for discrimination between the differently functionalised MWNTs. Although the present study is limited to a few examples, our measurements indicate the higher specificity obtained by the SERS approach and its possible use for a systematic study of functionalisation effects on MWNT structures.

In this work we show how the ab initio determination of van der Waals coefficients within time-dependent density functional theory can be used to build efficient and accurate atomistic models that describe the long-range interactions of proteins with other proteins and of proteins with semi-conducting surfaces. The model parameters are fitted so that they reproduce the ab initio van der Waals coefficients of amino acids and dipeptides. We then assess the quality of our results by comparing ab initio van der Waals coefficients for larger peptides with the coefficients yielded by the models. The different sets of parameters can be easily incorporated in current empirical force field methods, thus providing an essential ingredient for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins close to surfaces., (This journal is © the Owner Societies 2011)

We report linear response properties of the recently proposed boron fullerenes [N. Gonzalez Szwacki et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2007, 98, 166804]: magnetic susceptibilities, static dipole polarizabilities and dynamical polarizabilities (i.e. optical and near ultraviolet absorption spectra), calculated from first principles within the (time-dependent) density-functional theory framework. We find that all clusters except B80 are diamagnetic. The strong cancellation between diamagnetic and paramagnetic currents in B80 leads to a very small value for its susceptibility that turns out to be slightly paramagnetic. Static polarizabilities increase linearly with the number of B atoms. Furthermore, the absorption spectrum of B80 is very different from the one of its carbon counterpart C60, exhibiting a low absorption threshold of about 1.5 eV and many peaks in the visible and near ultraviolet. This can be understood by the analysis of the wavefunctions involved in the low energy transitions.