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    Engineering grain boundaries at the 2D limit for the hydrogen evolution reaction
    ([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2020) He, Yongmin; Tang, Pengyi; Hu, Zhili; He, Qiyuan; Zhu, Chao; Wang, Luqing; Zeng, Qingsheng; Golani, Prafful; Gao, Guanhui; Fu, Wei; Huang, Zhiqi; Gao, Caitian; Xia, Juan; Wang, Xingli; Wang, Xuewen; Zhu, Chao; Ramasse, Quentin M.; Zhang, Ao; An, Boxing; Zhang, Yongzhe; Martí-Sánchez, Sara; Morante, Joan Ramon; Wang, Liang; Tay, Beng Kang; Yakobson, Boris I.; Trampert, Achim; Zhang, Hua; Wu, Minghong; Wang, Qi Jie; Arbiol, Jordi; Liu, Zheng
    Atom-thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have emerged as fascinating materials and key structures for electrocatalysis. So far, their edges, dopant heteroatoms and defects have been intensively explored as active sites for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) to split water. However, grain boundaries (GBs), a key type of defects in TMDs, have been overlooked due to their low density and large structural variations. Here, we demonstrate the synthesis of wafer-size atom-thin TMD films with an ultra-high-density of GBs, up to ~1012 cm−2. We propose a climb and drive 0D/2D interaction to explain the underlying growth mechanism. The electrocatalytic activity of the nanograin film is comprehensively examined by micro-electrochemical measurements, showing an excellent hydrogen-evolution performance (onset potential: −25 mV and Tafel slope: 54 mV dec−1), thus indicating an intrinsically high activation of the TMD GBs.
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    Single molecule magnet with an unpaired electron trapped between two lanthanide ions inside a fullerene
    (London : Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Liu, F.; Krylov, D.S.; Spree, L.; Avdoshenko, S.M.; Samoylova, N.A.; Rosenkranz, M.; Kostanyan, A.; Greber, T.; Wolter, A.U.B.; Büchner, B.; Popov, A.A.
    Increasing the temperature at which molecules behave as single-molecule magnets is a serious challenge in molecular magnetism. One of the ways to address this problem is to create the molecules with strongly coupled lanthanide ions. In this work, endohedral metallofullerenes Y 2 @C 80 and Dy 2 @C 80 are obtained in the form of air-stable benzyl monoadducts. Both feature an unpaired electron trapped between metal ions, thus forming a single-electron metal-metal bond. Giant exchange interactions between lanthanide ions and the unpaired electron result in single-molecule magnetism of Dy 2 @C 80 (CH 2 Ph) with a record-high 100 s blocking temperature of 18 K. All magnetic moments in Dy 2 @C 80 (CH 2 Ph) are parallel and couple ferromagnetically to form a single spin unit of 21 μ B with a dysprosium-electron exchange constant of 32 cm -1. The barrier of the magnetization reversal of 613 K is assigned to the state in which the spin of one Dy centre is flipped.