title: Regulating energy transfer of excited carriers and the case for excitation-induced hydrogen dissociation on hydrogenated graphene.
abstract: Understanding and controlling of excited carrier dynamics is of fundamental and practical importance, particularly in photochemistry and solar energy applications. However, theory of energy relaxation of excited carriers is still in its early stage. Here, using ab initio molecular dynamics (MD) coupled with time-dependent density functional theory, we show a coverage-dependent energy transfer of photoexcited carriers in hydrogenated graphene, giving rise to distinctively different ion dynamics. Graphene with sparsely populated H is difficult to dissociate due to inefficient transfer of the excitation energy into kinetic energy of the H. In contrast, H can easily desorb from fully hydrogenated graphane. The key is to bring down the H antibonding state to the conduction band minimum as the band gap increases. These results can be contrasted to those of standard ground-state MD that predict H in the sparse case should be much less stable than that in fully hydrogenated graphane. Our findings thus signify the importance of carrying out explicit electronic dynamics in excited-state simulations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA.
authors.forename: Junhyeok
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bang
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.forename: Yi-Yang
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Damien
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: West
authors.forename: Zhiguo
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: S B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Zhang