Unraveling Electronic Structure, Magnetic States, and Topological Phenomena in Pristine, Defected, and Strained Ti2N MXene

Abstract

We unravel the evolution of structural, electronic, magnetic, and topological properties of graphene-like pristine, defected, and strained titanium nitride MXene with different functional groups (-F, -O, -H, and -OH) employing first-principles calculations. The formation and cohesive energies reveal their chemical stability. The MAX phase and defect free functionalized MXenes are metallic in nature except for oxygen terminated one, which is 100% spin polarized half-metallic. Additionally, the bare MXene is nearly half-metallic ferromagnet. The spin-orbit coupling significantly influences the bare MXene possessing band inversion. The strain effect sways the Fermi level thereby shifting it toward lower energy state under compression and toward higher energy state under tensile strain in Ti2NH2. These properties are reversed in Ti2N, Ti2NF2, and Ti2N(OH)2. The half-metallic nature changes to semi-metallic under 1% compression and is completely destroyed under 2% compression. In single vacancy defect, the band structure of Ti2NO2 remarkably transforms from half-metallic to semi-conducting (with large band gap of 1.73 eV) in 12.5% Ti, weakly semi-conducting in 5.5% Ti, and topological semi-metal in 12.5% oxygen. The 25% N defect changes the half-metallic to the metallic with certain topological features. Further, the 12.5% Co substitution in Ti2NO2 preserves the half-metallic character, whereas Mn substitution allows to convert half-metallic into weak semi-metallic preserving ferromagnetic character. However, Cr substitution converts half-metallic ferromagnetic to half-metallic anti-ferromagnetic state. The understanding made here on collective structural stability, and magnetic and topological phenomena in novel 2D MXenes open up their possibility in designing them for synthesis and thereby taking to applications.