Computational Synthesis of 2D Materials: A High-throughput Approach to Materials Design

Abstract: 2D materials find promising applications in next-generation devices, however, large-scale, low-defect, and reproducible synthesis of 2D materials remains a challenging task. To assist in the selection of suitable substrates for the synthesis of as-yet hypothetical 2D materials, we have developed an open-source high-throughput workflow package, $Hetero2d$, that searches for low-lattice mismatched substrate surfaces for any 2D material and determines the stability of these 2D-substrate heterostructures using density functional theory (DFT) simulations. $Hetero2d$ automates the generation of 2D-substrate heterostructures, the creation of DFT input files, the submission and monitoring of computational jobs on supercomputing facilities, and the storage of relevant parameters alongside the post-processed results in a MongoDB database. We demonstrate the capability of $Hetero2d$ in identifying stable 2D-substrate heterostructures for four 2D materials, namely $2H$-MoS$_2$, $1T$- and $2H$-NbO$_2$, and hexagonal-ZnTe, considering 50 cubic elemental substrates. We find Cu, Hf, Mn, Nd, Ni, Pd, Re, Rh, Sc, Ta, Ti, V, W, Y, and Zr substrates sufficiently stabilize the formation energies of these 2D materials, with binding energies in the range of ~0.1 - 0.6 eV/atom. Upon examining the $z$-separation, the charge transfer, and the electronic density of states at the 2D-substrate interface, we find a covalent type bonding at the interface which suggests that these substrates can be used as contact materials for the 2D materials. $Hetero2d$ (https://github.com/cmdlab/Hetero2d) is available on GitHub as an open-source package under the GNU license.