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Multiple Redox Modes in the Reversible Lithiation of High-Capacity, Peierls-Distorted Vanadium Sulfide.


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Authors

Britto, Sylvia 
Leskes, Michal 
Hua, Xiao 
Hébert, Claire-Alice 
Shin, Hyeon Suk 

Abstract

Vanadium sulfide VS4 in the patronite mineral structure is a linear chain compound comprising vanadium atoms coordinated by disulfide anions S2. (51)V NMR shows that the material, despite having V formally in the d(1) configuration, is diamagnetic, suggesting potential dimerization through metal-metal bonding associated with a Peierls distortion of the linear chains. This is supported by density functional calculations, and is also consistent with the observed alternation in V-V distances of 2.8 and 3.2 Å along the chains. Partial lithiation results in reduction of the disulfide ions to sulfide S(2-), via an internal redox process whereby an electron from V(4+) is transferred to S2 resulting in oxidation of V(4+) to V(5+) and reduction of the S2 to S(2-) to form Li3VS4 containing tetrahedral VS4 anions. On further lithiation this is followed by reduction of the V(5+) in Li3VS4 to form Li3+xVS4 (x = 0.5-1), a mixed valent V(4+)/V(5+) compound. Eventually reduction to Li2S plus elemental V occurs. Despite the complex redox processes involving both the cation and the anion occurring in this material, the system is found to be partially reversible between 0 and 3 V. The unusual redox processes in this system are elucidated using a suite of short-range characterization tools including (51)V nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), S K-edge X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES), and pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of X-ray data.

Description

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5b03395

Keywords

0302 Inorganic Chemistry, 0306 Physical Chemistry (incl. Structural)

Journal Title

J Am Chem Soc

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0002-7863
1520-5126

Volume Title

137

Publisher

American Chemical Society (ACS)
Sponsorship
SB acknowledges Schlumberger Stichting Fund and European Research Council (EU ERC) for funding. JC thanks BK21 plus project of Korea. We thank Phoebe Allan and Andrew J. Morris, University of Cambridge, for useful discussions. We also thank Trudy Bolin and Tianpin Wu of Beamline 9-BM, Argonne National Laboratory for help with XANES measurements. The DFT calculations were performed at the UCSB Center for Scientific Computing at UC Santa Barbara, supported by the California Nanosystems Institute (NSF CNS-0960316), Hewlett-Packard, and the Materials Research Laboratory (DMR-1121053). This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.