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Register a new userAnomalous melting behavior of solid hydrogen at high pressures
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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.
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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.
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.
There has been a major controversy over the past seven years about the high-pressure melting curves of transition metals. Static compression (diamond-anvil cell: DAC) experiments up to the Mbar region give very low melting slopes dT_m/dP, but shock-wave (SW) data reveal transitions indicating much larger dT_m/dP values. Ab initio calculations support the correctness of the shock data. In a very recent letter, Belonoshko et al. propose a simple and elegant resolution of this conflict for molybdenum. Using ab initio calculations based on density functional theory (DFT), they show that the high-P/high-T phase diagram of Mo must be more complex than was hitherto thought. Their calculations give convincing evidence that there is a transition boundary between the normal bcc structure of Mo and a high-T phase, which they suggest could be fcc. They propose that this transition was misinterpreted as melting in DAC experiments. In confirmation, they note that their boundary also explains a transition seen in the SW data. We regard Belonoshko et al.s Letter as extremely important, but we note that it raises some puzzling questions, and we believe that their proposed phase diagram cannot be completely correct. We have calculated the Helmholtz and Gibbs free energies of the bcc, fcc and hcp phases of Mo, using essentially the same quasiharmonic methods as used by Belonoshko et al.; we find that at high-P and T Mo in the hcp structure is more stable than in bcc or fcc.
We study the effect of temperature up to 1000K on the structure of dense molecular para-hydrogen and ortho-deuterium, using the path-integral Monte Carlo method. We find a structural phase transition from orientationally disordered hexagonal close packed (hcp) to an orthorhombic structure of Cmca symmetry before melting. The transition is basically induced by thermal fluctuations, but quantum fluctuations of protons (deuterons) are important in determining the transition temperature through effectively hardening the intermolecular interaction. We estimate the phase line between hcp and Cmca phases as well as the melting line of the Cmca solid.
The appropriateness of including Hg among the transition metals has been debated for a long time. Although the synthesis of HgF$_{4}$ molecules in gas phase was reported before, the molecules show strong instabilities and dissociate. Therefore, the transition metal propensity of Hg remains an open question. Here, we propose that high pressure provides a controllable method for preparing unusual oxidation states of matter. Using an advanced structure search method based on first-principles electronic structure calculations, we predict that under high pressures, Hg can transfer the electrons in its outmost $d$ shell to F atoms, thereby acting as a transition metal. Oxidation of Hg to the +4 state yielded thermodynamically stable molecular crystals consisting of HgF$_{4}$ planar molecules, a typical geometry for $d^{8}$ metal centers.
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