No Arabic abstract
A first-principles based methodology for efficiently and accurately finding thermodynamically stable and metastable atomic structures is introduced and benchmarked. The approach is demonstrated for gas-phase metal-oxide clusters in thermodynamic equilibrium with a reactive (oxygen) atmosphere at finite pressure and temperature. It consists of two steps. At first, the potential-energy surface is scanned by means of a global-optimization technique, i.e., a massive-parallel first-principles cascade genetic algorithm for which the choice of all parameters is validated against higher-level methods. In particular, we validate a) the criteria for selection and combination of structures used for the assemblage of new candidate structures, and b) the choice of the exchange-correlation functional. The selection criteria are validated against a fully unbiased method: replica-exchange molecular dynamics. Our choice of the exchange-correlation functional, the van-der-Waals-corrected PBE0 hybrid functional, is justified by comparisons up to highest level currently achievable within density-functional theory, i.e., the renormalized second-order perturbation theory, rPT2. In the second step, the low-energy structures are analyzed by means of ab initio atomistic thermodynamics in order to determine compositions and structures that minimize the Gibbs free energy at given temperature and pressure of the reactive atmosphere.
The PEO3:LiCF3SO3 polymer electrolyte has attracted significant research due to its enhanced stability at the lithium/polymer interface of high conductivity polymer batteries. Experimental studies have shown that, depending on the preparation conditions, both the PEO3:LiCF3SO3 crystalline complex and the PEO3:LiCF3SO3 amorphous phase can be formed. However, previous theoretical investigations focused on the short chain amorphous PEO3:LiCF3SO3 system. We report ab initio density-functional-theory calculations of crystalline PEO3:LiCF3SO3. The calculated results about the bonding configuration, electronic structures, and conductivity properties are in good agreement with the experimental measurements.
In this paper, we systematically investigated the structural and magnetic properties of CrTe by combining particle swarm optimization algorithm and first-principles calculations. With the electronic correlation effect considered, we predicted the ground-state structure of CrTe to be NiAs-type (space group P63/mmc) structure at ambient pressure, consistent with the experimental observation. Moreover, we found two extra meta-stable Cmca and R3m structure which have negative formation enthalpy and stable phonon dispersion at ambient pressure. The Cmca structure is a layered antiferromagnetic metal. The cleaved energy of a single layer is 0.464 J/m2, indicating the possible synthesis of CrTe monolayer. R3m structure is a ferromagnetic half-metal. When the pressure was applied, the ground-state structure of CrTe transitioned from P63/mmc to R3m, then to Fm3m structure at a pressure about 34 and 42 GPa, respectively. We thought these results help to motivate experimental studies the CrTe compounds in the application of spintronics.
A method is proposed to study the finite-temperature behaviour of small magnetic clusters based on solving the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations, where the effective magnetic field is calculated directly during the solution of the dynamical equations from first principles instead of relying on an effective spin Hamiltonian. Different numerical solvers are discussed in the case of a one-dimensional Heisenberg chain with nearest-neighbour interactions. We performed detailed investigations for a monatomic chain of ten Co atoms on top of Au(001) surface. We found a spiral-like ground state of the spins due to Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interactions, while the finite-temperature magnetic behaviour of the system was well described by a nearest-neighbour Heisenberg model including easy-axis anisotropy.
The interaction between electrons and lattice vibrations determines key physical properties of materials, including their electrical and heat transport, excited electron dynamics, phase transitions, and superconductivity. We present a new ab initio method that employs atomic orbital (AO) wavefunctions to compute the electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions in materials and interpolate the e-ph coupling matrix elements to fine Brillouin zone grids. We detail the numerical implementation of such AO-based e-ph calculations, and benchmark them against direct density functional theory calculations and Wannier function (WF) interpolation. The key advantages of AOs over WFs for e-ph calculations are outlined. Since AOs are fixed basis functions associated with the atoms, they circumvent the need to generate a material-specific localized basis set with a trial-and-error approach, as is needed in WFs. Therefore, AOs are ideal to compute e-ph interactions in chemically and structurally complex materials for which WFs are challenging to generate, and are also promising for high-throughput materials discovery. While our results focus on AOs, the formalism we present generalizes e-ph calculations to arbitrary localized basis sets, with WFs recovered as a special case.
A set of general constructing schemes is unveiled to predict a large family of stable boron monoelemental, hollow fullerenes with magic numbers 32+8k (k>=0). The remarkable stabilities of these new boron fullerenes are then studied by intense ab initio calculations. An electron counting rule as well as an isolated hollow rule are proposed to readily show the high stability and the electronic bonding property, which are also revealed applicable to a number of newly predicted boron sheets and nanotubes.