Ultrathin diamond films, or diamanes, are promising quasi-2D materials that are characterized by high stiffness, extreme wear resistance, high thermal conductivity, and chemical stability. Surface functionalization of multilayer graphene with different stackings of layers could be an interesting opportunity to induce proper electronic properties into diamanes. Combination of these electronic properties together with extraordinary mechanical ones will lead to their applications as field-emission displays substituting original devices with light-emitting diodes or organic light-emitting diodes. In the present study, we focus on the electronic properties of fluorinated and hydrogenated diamanes with (111), (110), (0001), (101̅0), and (2̅110) crystallographic orientations of surfaces of various thicknesses by using first-principles calculations and Bader analysis of electron density. We see that fluorine induces an occupied surface electronic state, while hydrogen modifies the occupied bulk state and also induces unoccupied surface states. Furthermore, a lower number of layers is necessary for hydrogenated diamanes to achieve the convergence of the work function in comparison with fluorinated diamanes, with the exception of fluorinated (110) and (2̅110) films that achieve rapid convergence and have the same behavior as other hydrogenated surfaces. This induces a modification of the work function with an increase of the number of layers that makes hydrogenated (2̅110) diamanes the most suitable surface for field-emission displays, better than the fluorinated counterparts. In addition, a quasi-quantitative descriptor of surface dipole moment based on the Tantardini-Oganov electronegativity scale is introduced as the average of bond dipole moments between the surface atoms. This new fundamental descriptor is capable of predicting a priori the bond dipole moment and may be considered as a new useful feature for crystal structure prediction based on artificial intelligence.
Keywords: ABINIT; Bader theory; GW approximation; Tantardini−Oganov electronegativity; diamanes; field-emission displays; meta-GGA.