Hydrogenating VO2 with protons in acid solution

Abstract

Hydrogenation is an effective way to tune material property1-5. Traditional techniques for doping hydrogen atoms into solid materials are very costly due to the need for noble metal catalysis and high-temperature/pressure annealing treatment or even high energy proton implantation in vacuum condition5-8. Acid solution contains plenty of freely-wandering protons, but it is difficult to act as a proton source for doping, since the protons always cause corrosions by destroying solid lattices before residing into them. Here we achieve a facile way to hydrogenate monoclinic vanadium dioxide (VO2) with protons in acid solution by attaching suitable metal to it. Considering the Schottky contact at the metal/VO2 interface, electrons flow from metal to VO2 due to workfunction difference and simultaneously attract free protons in acid solution to penetrate, forming the hydrogens dopants inside VO2 lattice. This metal-acid treatment constitutes an electron-proton co-doping strategy, which not only protects the VO2 lattice from corrosion, but also causes pronounced insulator-to-metal transitions. In addition, the metal-acid induced hydrogen doping behavior shows a ripple effect, and it can spread contagiously up to wafer-size area (>2 inch) even triggered by a tiny metal particle attachment (~1.0mm). This will stimulate a new way of simple and cost-effective atomic doping technique for some other oxide materials.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Reconfigurable Multistate Optical Systems Enabled by VO2 Phase Transitions
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• Atomic origin for hydrogenation promoted bulk oxygen vacancies removal in vanadium dioxide
• Ultrahigh ion diffusion in oxide crystal by engineering the interfacial transporter channels
• Manipulating the hydrogen-induced insulator-metal transition through artificial microstructure engineering
• Spatially-resolved insulator-metal transition for rewritable optical gratings
• Electron-proton Co-doping Induced Metal-insulator Transition in VO2 Film via Surface Self-assembled Ascorbic Acid Molecules
• Topotactic phase transformation in correlated vanadium dioxide through oxygen vacancy ordering
• Visualizing an adjustable WO3/p-GaN heterojunction
• Unveiling the critical role of interfacial strain in adjusting electronic phase transitions in correlated vanadium dioxide