No Arabic abstract
Recently, Mitsuhashi et al., have observed superconductivity with transition temperature up to 18 K in potassium doped picene (C22H14), a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon compound [Nature 464 (2010) 76]. Theoretical analysis indicate the importance of electron-phonon coupling in the superconducting mechanisms of these systems, with different emphasis on inter- and intra-molecular vibrations, depending on the approximations used. Here we present a combined experimental and ab-initio study of the Raman and infrared spectrum of undoped solid picene, which allows us to unanbiguously assign the vibrational modes. This combined study enables the identification of the modes which couple strongly to electrons and hence can play an important role in the superconducting properties of the doped samples.
We present high-quality optical data and density functional perturbation theory calculations for the vibrational spectrum of solid picene (C$_{22}$H$_{14}$) under pressure up to 8 GPa. First-principles calculations reproduce with a remarkable accuracy the pressure effects on both frequency and intensities of the phonon peaks experimentally observed . Through a detailed analysis of the phonon eigenvectors, We use the projection on molecular eigenmodes to unambiguously fit the experimental spectra, resolving complicated spectral structures, in a system with hundreds of phonon modes. With these projections, we can also quantify the loss of molecular character under pressure. Our results indicate that picene, despite a sim 20 % compression of the unit cell, remains substantially a molecular solid up to 8 GPa, with phonon modes displaying a smooth and uniform hardening with pressure. The Grueneisen parameter of the 1380 cm^{-1} a_1 Raman peak ($gamma_p=0.1$) is much lower than the effective value ($gamma_d=0.8$) due to K doping. This is an indication that the phonon softening in K doped samples is mainly due to charge transfer and electron-phonon coupling.
In this work, we present a computational scheme for isolating the vibrational spectrum of a defect in a solid. By quantifying the defect character of the atom-projected vibrational spectra, the contributing atoms are identified and the strength of their contribution determined. This method could be used to systematically improve phonon fragment calculations. More interestingly, using the atom-projected vibrational spectra of the defect atoms directly, it is possible to obtain a well-converged defect spectrum at lower computational cost, which also incorporates the host-lattice interactions. Using diamond as the host material, four test case defects, each presenting a distinctly different vibrational behaviour, are considered: a heavy substitutional dopant (Eu), two intrinsic defects (neutral vacancy and split interstitial), and the negatively charged N-vacancy center. The heavy dopant and split interstitial present localized modes at low and high frequencies, respectively, showing little overlap with the host spectrum. In contrast, the neutral vacancy and the N-vacancy center show a broad contribution to the upper spectral range of the host spectrum, making them challenging to extract. Independent of the vibrational behaviour, the main atoms contributing to the defect spectrum can be clearly identified. Recombination of their atom-projected spectra results in the isolated defect spectrum.
To explore the electronic structure of the first aromatic superconductor, potassium-doped solid picene which has been recently discovered by Mitsuhashi et al with the transition temperatures $T_c=7 - 20$ K, we have obtained a first-principles electronic structure of solid picene as a first step toward the elucidation of the mechanism of the superconductivity. The undoped crystal is found to have four conduction bands, which are characterized in terms of the maximally localized Wannier orbitals. We have revealed how the band structure reflects the stacked arrangement of molecular orbitals for both undoped and doped (K$_3$picene) cases, where the bands are not rigid. The Fermi surface for K$_3$picene is a curious composite of a warped two-dimensional surface and a three-dimensional one.
We present a vibrational dynamical mean-field theory (VDMFT) of the dynamics of atoms in solids with anharmonic interactions. Like other flavors of DMFT, VDMFT maps the dynamics of a periodic anharmonic lattice of atoms onto those of a self-consistently defined impurity problem with local anharmonicity and coupling to a bath of harmonic oscillators. VDMFT is exact in the harmonic and molecular limits, nonperturbative, systematically improvable through its clusters extensions, and usable with classical or quantum impurity solvers, depending on the importance of nuclear quantum effects. When tested on models of anharmonic optical and acoustic phonons, we find that classical VDMFT gives good agreement with classical molecular dynamics, including the temperature dependence of phonon frequencies and lifetimes. Using a quantum impurity solver, signatures of nuclear quantum effects are observed at low temperatures.
We implement the GW space-time method at finite temperatures, in which the Greens function G and the screened Coulomb interaction W are represented in the real space on a suitable mesh and in imaginary time in terms of Chebyshev polynomials, paying particular attention to controlling systematic errors of the representation. Having validated the technique by the canonical application to silicon and germanium, we apply it to calculation of band gaps in hexagonal solid hydrogen with the bare Greens function obtained from density functional approximation and the interaction screened within the random phase approximation (RPA). The results, obtained from the asymptotic decay of the full Greens function without resorting to analytic continuation, suggest that the solid hydrogen above 250 GPa can not adopt the hexagonal-closed-pack (hcp) structure. The demonstrated ability of the method to store the full G and W functions in memory with sufficient accuracy is crucial for its subsequent extensions to include higher orders of the diagrammatic series by means of diagrammatic Monte Carlo algorithms.