Transition metal nitrides have been suggested to have both high hardness and good thermal stability with large potential application value, but so far stable superhard transition metal nitrides have not been synthesiz...Transition metal nitrides have been suggested to have both high hardness and good thermal stability with large potential application value, but so far stable superhard transition metal nitrides have not been synthesized. Here, with our newly developed machine-learning accelerated crystal structure searching method, we designed a superhard tungsten nitride, h-WN6, which can be synthesized at pressure around 65 GPa and quenchable to ambient pressure. This h-WN6 is constructed with single-bonded armchair-like N6 rings and presents ionic-like features, which can be formulated as W^2.4＋N^2.4-. It has a band gap of 1.6 eV at 0GPa and exhibits an abnormal gap broadening behavior under pressure. Excitingly, this h-WN6 is found to be the hardest among transition metal nitrides known so far （Vickers hardness around 57 GPa） and also has a very high melting temperature （around 1,900 K）. Additionally, the good gravimet- ric （3.1 kJ/g/and volumetric （28.0 kJ/cm3） energy densities make this nitrogen-rich compound a potential high-energy-density material, These predictions support the designing rules and may stimulate future experiments to synthesize superhard and high-energy-density material.展开更多
基金financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (2016YFA0300404 and 2015CB921202)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51372112 and 11574133)+2 种基金the NSF of Jiangsu Province (BK20150012)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,the Science Challenge Project (TZ2016001)Special Program for Applied Research on Super Computation of the NSFC-Guangdong Joint Fund (the second phase) under Grant No.U1501501
文摘Transition metal nitrides have been suggested to have both high hardness and good thermal stability with large potential application value, but so far stable superhard transition metal nitrides have not been synthesized. Here, with our newly developed machine-learning accelerated crystal structure searching method, we designed a superhard tungsten nitride, h-WN6, which can be synthesized at pressure around 65 GPa and quenchable to ambient pressure. This h-WN6 is constructed with single-bonded armchair-like N6 rings and presents ionic-like features, which can be formulated as W^2.4＋N^2.4-. It has a band gap of 1.6 eV at 0GPa and exhibits an abnormal gap broadening behavior under pressure. Excitingly, this h-WN6 is found to be the hardest among transition metal nitrides known so far （Vickers hardness around 57 GPa） and also has a very high melting temperature （around 1,900 K）. Additionally, the good gravimet- ric （3.1 kJ/g/and volumetric （28.0 kJ/cm3） energy densities make this nitrogen-rich compound a potential high-energy-density material, These predictions support the designing rules and may stimulate future experiments to synthesize superhard and high-energy-density material.
