We report a study of the growth of iron nitride on gallium nitride using molecular beam epitaxy with Fe e-beam evaporation and rf N-plasma growth. Thin iron nitride layers of thickness about 16 nm were grown and monitored in-situ using reflection high energy electron diffraction. The samples following growth were analyzed ex-situ using a variety of techniques including x-ray diffraction, Ruther...

Graphene and hexagonal boron nitride are typical conductor and insulator, respectively, while their hybrids hexagonal boron carbonitride are promising as a semiconductor. Here we demonstrate a direct chemical conversion reaction, which systematically converts the hexagonal carbon lattice of graphene to boron nitride, making it possible to produce uniform boron nitride and boron carbonitride str...

Tantalum cobalt nitride photocatalysts were prepared using a simple drop coating method on a Ta foil substrate followed by thermal ammonia treatment, and their photoelectrochemical (PEC) properties for water oxidation under visible light were studied. The resulting Ta0.9Co0.1Nx films showed a photocurrent of ca. 1.5 mA/cm (12 times higher than that of Ta3N5) under 100 mW/cm visible light irradi...

Nickel nitride electrodes were prepared by reactive sputtering of nickel under a N2 atmosphere at room temperature for application in mesoscopic dye- or quantum dot- sensitized solar cells. This facile and reliable method led to the formation of a Ni2N film with a cauliflower-like nanostructure and tetrahedral crystal lattice. The prepared nickel nitride electrodes exhibited an excellent chemic...

Ambient energy harvesting using piezoelectric nanomaterials is today considered as a promising way to supply microelectronic devices. Since the first demonstration of electrical energy generation from piezoelectric semiconductor nanowires in 2006, the piezoelectric response of 1D-nanostructures and the development of nanowirebased piezogenerators have become a hot topic in nanoscience. After se...

Robust evaluation of potential environmental and health risks of carbonaceous and boron nitride nanomaterials (NMs) is imperative. However, significant agglomeration of pristine carbonaceous and boron nitride NMs due to strong van der Waals forces renders them not suitable for direct toxicity testing in aqueous media. Here, the natural polysaccharide alginic acid (AA) was used as a nontoxic, en...

Graphitic carbon nitride based semiconductor materials are found to be potential photocatalysts for generating hydrogen through solar water splitting. Through more accurate hybrid density functional theory calculations, we attempted to tune the electronic band structure of poly s-triazine based graphitic carbon nitride by decorating it with different metal atoms and clusters for improving its v...

We present a theoretical study of hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride a-SiNx :H , with equal concentrations of Si and N atoms x=1 , for two considerably different densities 2.0 and 3.0 g /cm3 . Densities and hydrogen concentration were chosen according to experimental data. Using first-principles molecular-dynamics within density-functional theory the models were generated by cooling from th...

The precipitation of tungsten nitride upon internal nitriding of ferritic Fe0.5 at.% W alloy was investigated at 610 °C in a flowing NH3/H2 gas mixture. Different tungsten nitrides developed successively; the thermodynamically stable hexagonal δ-WN could not be detected. The state of deformation of the surface plays an important role for the development of tungsten nitride at the surface. The m...

Fixed nitrogen is an essential chemical building block for plant and animal protein, which makes ammonia (NH3) a central component of synthetic fertilizer for the global production of food and biofuels. A global project on artificial photosynthesis may foster the development of production technologies for renewable NH3 fertilizer, hydrogen carrier and combustion fuel. This article presents an a...