Novel functionalities in chemically-modified quasi-2D clay minerals.
ORAL
Abstract
Clays are among the most common, cheap, non-toxic and abundant materials found in nature with an inherent \textit{quasi-2D} crystal structure that can be chemically modified to obtain novel functionalities. In this work, we used our High-Throughput infrastructure, (AFLOW$\pi$ + PAOFLOW) , to compute the electronic structure and related properties for minerals in the clay family: lizardite (Mg3(Si2O5)(OH)4), talc (Mg3(Si2O5)2(OH)2, kaolinite (Al2(Si2O5)(OH)4) and pyrophyllite (Al2(Si2O5)2(OH)2. We studied the effect of chemical substitutions on the mechanical, optical, electronic and magnetic properties in these four prototypes. We found that Ni-substituted kaolinite (Ni3(Si2O5)(OH)4 is structurally stable and is a promising candidate for spintronic applications.
*We acknowledges collaboration within the AFLOW Consortium (www.aflow.org) under the sponsorship of DOD-ONR (Grants N000141310635 and N000141512266).
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Presenters
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Priya Gopal
- Department of Physics, University of North Texas, Denton, TX