Structural and Interfacial Characterization of a Photocatalytic Titanium MOF-Phosphate Glass Composite

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces American Chemical Society (ACS) 17:10 (2025) 15793-15803

Authors:

Celia Castillo-Blas, Montaña J García, Ashleigh M Chester, Matjaž Mazaj, Shaoliang Guan, Georgina P Robertson, Ayano Kono, James MA Steele, Luis León-Alcaide, Bruno Poletto-Rodrigues, Philip A Chater, Silvia Cabrera, Andraž Krajnc, Lothar Wondraczek, David A Keen, Jose Alemán, Thomas D Bennett

Structural insights of mechanochemically amorphised MIL-125-NH 2

Chemical Communications Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) (2025)

Authors:

Emily V Shaw, Celia Castillo-Blas, Timothy Lambden, Beatriz de Santos, Bethan Turner, Giulio I Lampronti, Joonatan EM Laulainen, Georgina P Robertson, Ashleigh M Chester, Chumei Ye, Shaoliang Guan, Joshua KG Karlsson, Valentina Martinez, Ivana Brekalo, Bahar Karadeniz, Silvia Cabrera, Lauren N McHugh, Krunoslav Užarević, Jose Alemán, Alberto Fraile, Rachel C Evans, Paul A Midgley, David A Keen, Xavier Moya, Thomas D Bennett

Solvent-free approach for the synthesis of heterometallic Fe-Zn-ZIF glass <i>via</i> a melt-quenched process.

Chemical science (2025)

Authors:

Luis León-Alcaide, Celia Castillo-Blas, Vlad Martin-Diaconescu, Ivan da Silva, David A Keen, Thomas D Bennett, Guillermo Mínguez Espallargas

Abstract:

We report the solvent-free synthesis of a crystalline heterometallic imidazolate derivative with formula [Fe1Zn2(im)6(Him)2], designated MUV-25, incorporating both iron and zinc. The structure imposes strict positional constraints on the metal centres due to the lattice containing distinct geometric coordination sites, tetrahedral and octahedral. As a consequence, each metal is exclusively directed to its specific coordination site, ensuring precise spatial organization within the lattice. Atom locations were meticulously monitored utilizing X-ray diffraction (single crystal and total scattering) and XAS techniques, demonstrating that the tetrahedral sites are occupied exclusively by zinc, and the octahedral sites are occupied by iron. This combination of metal centres results, upon heating, in a structural phase transformation to the zni topology at a very low temperature. Further heating causes the melting of the solid, yielding a heterometallic MOF-derived glass. The methodology lays the groundwork for tailoring crystalline structures to advance the development of novel materials capable of melting and forming glasses upon cooling.

Highly porous metal-organic framework glass design and application for gas separation membranes

Nature Communications Springer Nature 16:1 (2025) 1622

Authors:

Shichun Li, Chao Ma, Jingwei Hou, Shuwen Yu, Aibing Chen, Juan Du, Philip A Chater, Dean S Keeble, Zhihua Qiao, Chongli Zhong, David A Keen, Yu Liu, Thomas D Bennett

Probing spectral features of quantum many-body systems with quantum simulators

Nature Communications Nature Research 16:1 (2025) 1403

Authors:

Jinzhao Sun, Lucia Vilchez-Estevez, Vlatko Vedral, Andrew T Boothroyd, MS Kim

Abstract:

The efficient probing of spectral features is important for characterising and understanding the structure and dynamics of quantum materials. In this work, we establish a framework for probing the excitation spectrum of quantum many-body systems with quantum simulators. Our approach effectively realises a spectral detector by processing the dynamics of observables with time intervals drawn from a defined probability distribution, which only requires native time evolution governed by the Hamiltonian without ancilla. The critical element of our method is the engineered emergence of frequency resonance such that the excitation spectrum can be probed. We show that the time complexity for transition energy estimation has a logarithmic dependence on simulation accuracy and how such observation can be guaranteed in certain many-body systems. We discuss the noise robustness of our spectroscopic method and show that the total running time maintains polynomial dependence on accuracy in the presence of device noise. We further numerically test the error dependence and the scalability of our method for lattice models. We present simulation results for the spectral features of typical quantum systems, either gapped or gapless, including quantum spins, fermions and bosons. We demonstrate how excitation spectra of spin-lattice models can be probed experimentally with IBM quantum devices.