A Wide Bandgap Semiconducting Magnesium Hydrogel: Moisture Harvest, Iodine Sequestration, and Resistive Switching
Noohul Alam, S. Majumder, S. J. Ray, Debajit Sarma
Abstract
Water harvesting from the ubiquitous moisture is pivotal for delivering fresh water to earth’s arid/semiarid regions, and sequestration of iodine from the solution is crucial for environmental safety due to its severe effect on human metabolic processes. In this context, herein, a multifunctional supramolecular metallohydrogel (Mg@TAEA) is synthesized through direct mixing of magnesium nitrate hexahydrate and the low molecular weight gelator tris(2-aminoethyl)amine. Electron microscopy reveals that Mg@TAEA is sculptured in vertically grown well-oriented micrometer-sized flakes. The porous crystalline material (52 m2/g) was found to be an efficacious host matrix for water harvesting from moisture (847 mg/g). Mg@TAEA shows effective (513 mg/g) iodine sequestration from solution and adsorption of carbon dioxide (15 mg/g). The wide bandgap semiconducting Mg@TAEA (3.6 eV) material is a potential candidate for building memory devices, and the Ion/Ioff ratio of the device based on the indium tin oxide (ITO)/Mg@TAEA/Ag heterostructure was found to be ∼62. We further extended our work by analyzing the charge transport properties of the system and found space charge limited conduction (SCLC) and trap-filled SCLC to be responsible for the nonlinear transport behavior observed in the device.