Metal hydrides with a high hydrogen content have long been considered for materials-based hydrogen storage and but are now attracting attention as potential high-temperature superconductors.1 Recently, we showed that cryo-milling lanthanum improves hydrogen diffusion, yielding a higher hydrogen-to-metal ratio of lanthanum hydride up to LaH4.2 Another strategy for improving the thermodynamics and hydrogen desorption kinetics of metal hydrides is nanoconfinement within porous hosts.3,4 However, this has not previously been achieved for lanthanum hydride (LaHx) due to the difficulty of isolating nanoparticles of La or La-hydrides.In this work we demonstrate that LaHx can be infiltrated into two porous carbons: nitrogen-doped CMK-3 (NCMK-3) and undoped CMK-3, both with average pore size 4-5 nm. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images reveal that LaHx species are distributed uniformly throughout these hosts in NCMK-3 and CMK-3 with rod and spherical morphologies, respectively. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and X-ray photoelectron microscopy (XPS) were used to probe the coordination environment of the LaHx species and composition lanthanum and nitrogen. Sieverts measurements indicate that LaHx@NCMK-3 desorbs up to 0.7 wt % hydrogen, which is higher than the non-nitrogen functionalized CMK-3 (0.5 wt%H). Density Functional Theory (DFT) and ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) calculations predict that host-guest interaction energies are favorable for porous carbon with pyridinic, pyrolic, or pyridonic nitrogen defects on a graphene surface, consistent with experimental data. Moreover, high-pressure experiments were conducted to understand the tunability of hydrogen content in presence of ammonia borane as a hydrogen source. These revealed that the as-prepared materials underwent an increase in H:La ratio from 1.5 to 3.0 with pressure. Our results demonstrate that nitrogen-doped nanoporous carbons can confine lanthanum hydrides, favor higher H:La ratios, and could serve as a platform for developing superconducting materials at relatively low pressures (compared with diamond anvil cells) and temperatures. -W. Guan, R. J. Helmley, V. Viswanathan Combining pressure and electrochemistry to synthesize superhydrides PNAS 2021, 118, e2110470118.Duwal, V. Stavila, C. Spataru, M. Shivanna, P. Allen, T. Elmslie, T. C. Seagle, J. Jeffries, N. Velisavljevic, J. Smith, P. Chow, Y. Xiao, Y. Meng, M. Somayazulu, P. A. Sharma Enhancement of hydrogen absorption and hypervalent metal hydride formation in lanthanum using cryogenic ball milling Phys. Rev. Mater., 2024, submitted.Stavila, S. Li, C. Dun, M. A. T. Marple, H. E. Mason, J. L. Snider, et al. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2021, 60, 25815-25824.Schneemann, L. F. Wan, A. S. Lipton, Y.-S. Liu, J. L. Snider, A. A. Baker, et al. ACS Nano 2020, 14, 10294-10304.
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