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A facile approach for generating ordered oxygen vacancies in metal oxides

Nature Materials volume 24, pages 835–842 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Oxygen vacancies in oxide materials, although demonstrated to be beneficial for many applications, are hard to be generated and manipulated as desired, particularly for bulk materials with a large size and limited surface area. Here, by simply coupling the thermal activation with a simultaneously applied electric field, we efficiently generate ordered oxygen vacancies within bulk crystals of ternary SrAl2O4, binary TiO2 and other common oxide materials, which give rise to superior functionalities. We expect that this approach offers a general and practical way for the vacancy engineering of oxide materials and holds great promise for their applications.

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Fig. 1: Creation of the ordered-VO structure in SrAl2O4 by ET treatment.
Fig. 2: Configurations of ordered VO in bulk SrAl2O4, and the effects of an electric field on the formation of an ordered-VO structure.
Fig. 3: Afterglow performance of the sample.
Fig. 4: STEM-ABF imaging for the sample.

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All data and relevant information are available within the Article and its Supplementary Information. Data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge C. Nan, L. Gu, S. Du, Z. Lin and L. Li for many discussions and helpful suggestions. R.S.-Y. acknowledges financial support from NSF DMR-1809439 for the TiO2 STEM characterizations. Use of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) 9-BM beamline at Argonne National Laboratory, Office of Science User Facility, was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Kexin Chen, Xuanyi Yuan, Zhaobo Tian, Mingchu Zou.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Advanced Metals and Materials, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

    Kexin Chen

  2. Advanced Structural Ceramics Innovation Center, YongJiang Laboratory, Ningbo, China

    Kexin Chen

  3. Beijing Key Laboratory of Opto-electronic Functional Materials & Micro-nano Devices, Key Laboratory of Quantum State Construction and Manipulation (Ministry of Education), School of Physics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Xuanyi Yuan

  4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of New Ceramic Materials, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhaobo Tian, Mingchu Zou, Zhanglin Chen & Guanghua Liu

  5. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Yifei Yuan & Reza Shahbazian-Yassar

  6. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Qinghua Zhang, YuYang Zhang & Xin Jin

  7. College of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Tianpin Wu

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Contributions

K.C. conceived the idea, designed the experiments and guided the whole project. X.Y., Z.C. and G.L. synthesized the afterglow materials and performed the corresponding measurements. Z.T. and M.Z. synthesized the binary oxide samples with O defects and performed the corresponding measurements. Q.Z. carried out the electron microscopy characterizations for the SrAl2O4 sample. Y.Y. and R.S.-Y. carried out the electron microscopy characterizations for the TiO2 sample. Y.Z. and X.J. performed the first-principles calculations. T.W. and Y.Y. conducted the synchrotron analyses. All authors contributed to data interpretation and discussed the results.

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Correspondence to Kexin Chen or Guanghua Liu.

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Chen, K., Yuan, X., Tian, Z. et al. A facile approach for generating ordered oxygen vacancies in metal oxides. Nat. Mater. 24, 835–842 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02171-4

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