Office of Research and Innovation congratulates Prof. Dr. ZHENG Jin-Cheng for co-authoring a paper entitled “Reversible structure manipulation by tuning carrier concentration in metastable Cu2S” in the 12 September 2017 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, Vol 114, No 37, 9832-9837), which is one of the world’s most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals. This paper is authored by 11 scientists affiliated with Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Arkansas, Princeton University, Xiamen University China, and Xiamen University Malaysia.

The authors stated the significance of their study: “We manipulate the crystal structure of Cu2S nanoparticles in a controlled and reversible fashion via variation of the electron dose rate, observed by transmission electron microscopy. Our study sheds light on the much-debated question of whether a change in electronic structure can facilitate a change of crystal symmetry, or whether vice versa is always the case. We show that a minimal perturbation to the electronic degree of freedom can drive the structural phase transition in Cu2S, hence resolving this dilemma.”

Prof. Dr. Zheng’s contribution focused on the mechanism mining from the theoretical physics perspective.

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Structural phase diagram of Cu2S nanoplates. The structural phase diagram (temperature of the low-chalcocite to high-chalcocite phase transition as a function of electron dose rate) constructed from transmission electron microscopy experiments from individual Cu2S nanoplates. (Tao et al., 2017, PNAS, 114, 9832-9837.)   
  
This paper is available online:
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9832 
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9832.full.pdf