CONSPECTUS: The understanding of adsorption and reactions of (large) organic molecules at metal surfaces plays an increasingly important role in modern surface science and technology. Such hybrid inorganic/organic systems (HIOS) are relevant for many applications in catalysis, light-emitting diodes, single-molecule junctions, molecular sensors and switches, and photovoltaics. Obviously, the pre...

van der Waals (vdW) forces, despite being relatively weak, hold the layers together in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and play a key role in their band structure evolution, hence profoundly affecting their physical properties. In this work, we experimentally probe the vdW interactions in MoS2 and other TMDs by measuring the valence band maximum (VBM) splitting (Δ) at K point as a funct...

Van der Waals (vdW) interactions are important in numerous physical, chemical, and biological systems. However, traditional density functional theory (DFT) within local or semi-local approximations can hardly treat this interaction. Among various attempts to handle vdW interactions in DFT, semiempirical correction methods are known to present the advantages of low additional computational costs...

The accurate determination of stacking fault energies (SFE) and associated restoring forces is important for understanding plastic deformation, especially the dislocation emission and motion in metals. In this work, we use density-functional theory (DFT) calculations to, systematically study the all-dimension relaxed atomic models of Mg crystal slip, with a special focus on the “subslip modes” ...

Water is common and plays a crucial role in biological, chemical, and physical processes, but its crystalline or ice state has a complicated structure. In this work, we study the lattice mismatch challenge for ice nucleation on silver iodide, the sublimation energy for different ice phases, and the structural phase-transition pressures of ice, with various density functionals. Our calculations ...

Van der Waals (vdW) interaction, and its subtle interplay with chemically specific interactions and surface roughness at metal/organic interfaces, is critical to the understanding of structure-function relations in diverse areas, including catalysis, molecular electronics and self-assembly. However, vdW interactions remain challenging to characterize directly at the fundamental, single-molecule...

This paper gives a review of existing models used by other authors aiming at modeling micromanipulation tasks. It introduces the distinction between surface forces, which act even at distance (van der Waals (VDW), capillary and electrostatic forces) and contact forces, which are closely related to deformation and adhesion. Moreover, it presents our work on VDW and capillary forces: compared to ...

Biomolecules are complex systems stabilized by a delicate balance of weak interactions, making it important to assess all energetic contributions in an accurate manner. However, it is a priori unclear which contributions make more of an impact. Here, we examine stacked polyglutamine (polyQ) strands, a peptide repeat often found in amyloid aggregates. We investigate the role of hydrogen bond (HB...

Based on a statistical mechanics-based iterative method, we have extracted a set of distance-dependent, all-atom pairwise potentials for protein-ligand interactions from the crystal structures of 1300 protein-ligand complexes. The iterative method circumvents the long-standing reference state problem in knowledge-based scoring functions. The resulted scoring function, referred to as ITScore 2.0...

We present a new scheme to include the van der Waals (vdW) interactions in approximated Density Functional Theory (DFT) by combining the quantum harmonic oscillator model with the maximally localized Wannier function technique. With respect to the recently developed DFT/vdW-WF2 method, also based on Wannier Functions, the new approach is more general, being no longer restricted to the case of w...