“…As a promising tool, the QMC technique has been used previously to study diverse properties of bulk transition-metal oxides [23,[26][27][28], nanocrystals [29,30], atoms [31], molecules [32][33][34], 2D materials [35,36], diamond [37], MgSiO 3 perovskite [38], boron-nitride [39], point defects [40][41][42], Al [43], and Si [42,44,45] in previous studies. To date, to the best of our knowledge, this method has not been systematically used to calculate the bandgap parameters for freestanding 2D transition-metal oxides.…”