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Register a new userRoom-Temperature Structures of Solid Hydrogen at High Pressures
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By employing first-principles metadynamics simulations, we explore the 300 K structures of solid hydrogen over the pressure range 150-300 GPa. At 200 GPa, we find the ambient-pressure disordered hexagonal close-packed (hcp) phase transited into an insulating partially ordered hcp phase (po-hcp), a mixture of ordered graphene-like H2 layers and the other layers of weakly coupled, disordered H2 molecules. Within this phase, hydrogen remains in paired states with creation of shorter intra-molecular bonds, which are responsible for the very high experimental Raman peak above 4000 cm-1. At 275 GPa, our simulations predicted a transformation from po-hcp into the ordered molecular metallic Cmca phase (4 molecules/cell) that was previously proposed to be stable only above 400 GPa. Gibbs free energy calculations at 300 K confirmed the energetic stabilities of the po-hcp and metallic Cmca phases over all known structures at 220-242 GPa and >242 GPa, respectively. Our simulations highlighted the major role played by temperature in tuning the phase stabilities and provided theoretical support for claimed metallization of solid hydrogen below 300 GPa at 300 K.
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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and its properties under conditions of high temperature and pressure are crucial to understand the interior of of large gaseous planets and other astrophysical bodies. At ultra high pressures solid hydrogen has been predicted to transform into a quantum fluid, because of its high zero point motion. Here we report first principles two phase coexistence and Z method determinations of the melting line of solid hydrogen in a pressure range spanning from 30 to 600 GPa. Our results suggest that the melting line of solid hydrogen, as derived from classical molecular dynamics simulations, reaches a minimum of 367 K at about 430 GPa, at higher pressures the melting line of the atomics Cs IV phase regain a positive slope. In view of the possible importance of quantum effects in hydrogen at such low temperatures, we also determined the melting temperature of the atomic CsIV phase at pressures of 400, 500, 600 GPa, employing Feynman path integral simulations. These result in a downward shift of the classical melting line by about 100 K, and hint at a possible secondary maximum in the melting line in the region between 500 and 600 GPa, testifying to the importance of quantum effects in this system. Combined, our results imply that the stability field of the zero temperature quantum liquid phase, if it exists at all, would only occur at higher pressures than previously thought.
The dissociative chemisorption of molecular nitrogen on clean lanthanide surfaces at ambient temperature and low pressure is explored. In-situ conductance measurements track the conversion from the lanthanide metals to the insulating lanthanide nitrides. A small partial pressure of oxygen ($sim 10^{-8}$ mbar) is shown to inhibit the nitridation of lanthanides at $10^{-4}$ mbar of N$_2$. The rate of nitridation as a function of nitrogen pressure is measured at low pressure for a series of lanthanide elements, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, ytterbium and praseodymium. Exposure of the lanthanide surfaces to both N$_2$ and H$_2$ results in the formation of NH$_3$.
Establishing the phase diagram of hydrogen is a major challenge for experimental and theoretical physics. Experiment alone cannot establish the atomic structure of solid hydrogen at high pressure, because hydrogen scatters X-rays only weakly. Instead our understanding of the atomic structure is largely based on density functional theory (DFT). By comparing Raman spectra for low-energy structures found in DFT searches with experimental spectra, candidate atomic structures have been identified for each experimentally observed phase. Unfortunately, DFT predicts a metallic structure to be energetically favoured at a broad range of pressures up to 400 GPa, where it is known experimentally that hydrogen is nonmetallic. Here we show that more advanced theoretical methods (diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations) find the metallic structure to be uncompetitive, and predict a phase diagram in reasonable agreement with experiment. This greatly strengthens the claim that the candidate atomic structures accurately model the experimentally observed phases.
We present a x-ray dichroism study of graphite surfaces that addresses the origin and magnitude of ferromagnetism in metal-free carbon. We find that, in addition to carbon $pi$ states, also hydrogen-mediated electronic states exhibit a net spin polarization with significant magnetic remanence at room temperature. The observed magnetism is restricted to the top $approx$10 nm of the irradiated sample where the actual magnetization reaches $ simeq 15$ emu/g at room temperature. We prove that the ferromagnetism found in metal-free untreated graphite is intrinsic and has a similar origin as the one found in proton bombarded graphite.
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.
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