Mechanical strain effect on the optoelectronic properties and photocatalysis applications of layered AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure

Context

The aim of this work is to use first principles calculations to examine the effects of different mechanical strains on the optoelectronic and photocatalytic capabilities of the 2D/2D nanoheterostructure of AlN/GaN. By utilizing the lmBJ (Meta-GGA) and PBEsol (GGA) functional, the bandgap of the nanoheterostructure is calculated and found to be 4.89 eV and 3.24 eV. Simulated 2D AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure exhibits exceptional optical and electronic characteristics under applied biaxial tensile and compressive strains. The band gap changes from 4.89 to 3.77 eV, while the energy gap nature transitions from direct to indirect during tensile strain fluctuations of 0% to 8%. Strain is also found to have a significant effect on the optical absorption peaks. And a 0–8% rise in tensile strain causes the initial absorption peak of the 2D AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure to shift from 4.88 to 4.20 eV, which results in a 14% red shift in photon energy for every 2% change in strain. Furthermore, the optimum bandgap and band edge positions of the 2D AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure enable the water redox process to produce hydrogen and oxygen for wide range of pH. Thus, modification via strain may be an effective method for altering the optical as well as electronic characteristics of a 2D AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure, and this study may pave the way for new applications of this material in optoelectronic devices in the future.

Methods

In the current work, density functional theory is used to explore every attribute of the 2D AlN/GaN nanoheterostructure. To characterize the electronic exchange–correlation, we used the PBEsol functional. In order to prevent any interlayer contact between periodicity of images, a vacuum is produced along the z-direction of approximately 10 Å. To increase the precision of bandgap prediction, the electronic and optical characteristics were computed using the meta-GGA lmBJ functional. To account for interlayer van der Waals interactions, nanoheterostructure computations were performed using the DFT-D3 functional.