No Arabic abstract
The pressure-volume-temperature equation of state of the intermetallic compound NiAl was calculated theoretically, and compared with experimental measurements. Electron ground states were calculated for NiAl in the CsCl structure, using density functional theory, and were used to predict the cold compression curve and the density of phonon states. The Rose form of compression curve was found to reproduce the ab initio calculations well in compression but exhibited significant deviations in expansion. A thermodynamically-complete equation of state was constructed for NiAl. Shock waves were induced in crystals of NiAl by the impact of laser-launched Cu flyers and by launching NiAl flyers into transparent windows of known properties. The TRIDENT laser was used to accelerate the flyers to speeds between 100 and 600m/s. Point and line-imaging laser Doppler velocimetry was used to measure the acceleration of the flyer and the surface velocity history of the target. The velocity histories were used to deduce the stress state, and hence states on the principal Hugoniot and the flow stress. Flyers and targets were recovered from most experiments. The effect of elasticity and plastic flow in the sample and window was assessed. The ambient isotherm reproduced static compression data very well, and the predicted Hugoniot was consistent with shock compression data.
We study the zero-temperature equation of state (EOS) of solid 4He in the hexagonal closed packet (hcp) phase over the 0-57 GPa pressure range by means of the Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) method and the semi-empirical Aziz pair potential HFD-B(HE). In the low pressure regime (P ~ 0-1 GPa) we assess excellent agreement with experiments and we give an accurate description of the atomic kinetic energy, Lindemann ratio and Debye temperature over a wide range of molar volumes (22-6 cm^{3}/mol). However, on moving to higher pressures our calculated P-V curve presents an increasingly steeper slope which ultimately provides differences within ~40 % with respect to measurements. In order to account for many-body interactions arising in the crystal with compression which are not reproduced by our model, we perform additional electronic density-functional theory (DFT) calculations for correcting the computed DMC energies in a perturbative way. We explore both generalized gradient and local density approximations (GGA and LDA, respectively) for the electronic exchange-correlation potential. By proceeding in this manner, we show that discrepancies with respect to high pressure data are reduced to 5-10 % with few computational extra cost. Further comparison between our calculated EOSs and ab initio curves deduced for the perfect crystal and corrected for the zero-point motion of the atoms enforces the reliability of our approach.
We present results of Diffusion Monte Carlo calculations for a system of solid ortho-D_2 at different densities, for pressure ranging from 0 up to 350MPa. We compare the equation of state obtained using two of the most used effective intermolecular potentials, i.e. the Silvera--Goldman and the Buck potentials, with experimental data, in order to assess the validity of the model interactions. The Silvera-Goldman potential has been found to provide a satisfactory agreement with experimental results, showing that, as opposed to what recently found for p-H_2, three--body forces can be efficiently accounted for by an effective two--body term.
The development of spin qubits for quantum technologies requires their protection from the main source of finite-temperature decoherence: atomic vibrations. Here we eliminate one of the main barriers to the progress in this field by providing a complete first-principles picture of spin relaxation that includes up to two-phonon processes. Our method is based on machine learning and electronic structure theory and makes the prediction of spin lifetime in realistic systems feasible. We study a prototypical vanadium-based molecular qubit and reveal that the spin lifetime at high temperature is limited by Raman processes due to a small number of THz intra-molecular vibrations. These findings effectively change the conventional understanding of spin relaxation in this class of materials and open new avenues for the rational design of long-living spin systems.
The ground state of solid $^4$He is studied using the diffusion Monte Carlo method and a new trial wave function able to describe the supersolid. The new wave function is symmetric under the exchange of particles and reproduces the experimental equation of state. Results for the one-body density matrix show the existence of off-diagonal long-range order with a very small condensate fraction $sim 10^{-4}$. The superfluid density of the commensurate system is below our resolution threshold, $rho_s/rho < 10^{-5}$. With a 1% concentration of vacancies the superfluid density is manifestly larger, $rho_s/rho=3.2(1) cdot 10^{-3}$.
Although solid helium-4 (4He) may be a supersolid it also exhibits many phenomena unexpected in that context. We studied relaxation dynamics in the resonance frequency f(T) and dissipation D(T) of a torsional oscillator containing solid 4He. With the appearance of the supersolid state, the relaxation times within f(T) and D(T) began to increase rapidly together. More importantly, the relaxation processes in both D(T) and a component of f(T) exhibited a complex synchronized ultraslow evolution towards equilibrium. Analysis using a generalized rotational susceptibility revealed that, while exhibiting these apparently glassy dynamics, the phenomena were quantitatively inconsistent with a simple excitation freeze-out transition because the variation in f was far too large. One possibility is that amorphous solid 4He represents a new form of supersolid in which dynamical excitations within the solid control the superfluid phase stiffness.