Dr. Ying Wang 

Increasing environmental issues and the imminent shortage of fossil fuels are motivating researchers to exploit clean, efficient, and sustainable technologies to store and convert energy. Although binary oxide materials have shown promising properties, the flexibility for relevant applications is often limited. Ternary oxides, formed by doping additional elements into binary oxides, have the potential to overcome these problems and therefore attract more attention. Varying composition ratios can precisely tune the properties of these mixed oxides, allowing the nanoscale control of future materials production. One exciting feature of these hybrid oxide materials is their step edges, as most catalytic reactions actually take place at the step edges of a catalyst; the possibility of tuning the properties of edge sites in mixed oxides is, therefore, of utmost importance for improving and controlling the catalytic properties of surfaces. Our previously published results successfully show the synthesis and characterization of monolayer mixed vanadium and iron oxide supported on Pt(111) substrate. Based on the results, our current and future work will focus on identifying the variation of the edge structures for both the pure vanadium oxide and the mixed oxide. The nature of edge atoms and species, the relation of edge structure, equilibration, and potential properties as a function of preparation methods (by varying the Fe content and the oxidation condition) will be discussed and reported. The technique involved in the project is a combination of experimental data and theoretical calculation. The experimental data will be obtained by scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and calculations performed by density functional theory (DFT) and Monte Carlo simulation, obtained with the support of collaborating theoretical physicists at the Sorbonne University, Paris.