No Arabic abstract
Ga2O3 is a wide-band-gap semiconductor of great interest for applications in electronics and optoelectronics. Two-dimensional (2D) Ga2O3 synthesized from top-down or bottom-up processes can reveal brand new heterogeneous structures and promising applications. In this paper, we study phase transitions among three low-energy stable Ga2O3 monolayer configurations using density functional theory and a newly developed machine-learning Gaussian approximation potential, together with solid-state nudged elastic band calculations. Kinetic minimum energy paths involving direct atomic jump as well as concerted layer motion are investigated. The low phase transition barriers indicate feasible tunability of the phase transition and orientation via strain engineering and external electric fields. Large-scale calculations using the newly trained machine-learning potential on the thermally activated single-atom jumps reveal the clear nucleation and growth processes of different domains. The results provide useful insights to future experimental synthesis and characterization of 2D Ga2O3 monolayers.
Ferroelectricity and metallicity are usually believed not to coexist because conducting electrons would screen out static internal electric fields. In 1965, Anderson and Blount proposed the concept of ferroelectric metal, however, it is only until recently that very rare ferroelectric metals were reported. Here, by combining high-throughput ab initio calculations and data-driven machine learning method with new electronic orbital based descriptors, we systematically investigated a large family (2,964) of two-dimensional (2D) bimetal phosphates, and discovered 60 stable ferroelectrics with out-of-plane polarization, including 16 ferroelectric metals and 44 ferroelectric semiconductors that contain seven multiferroics. The ferroelectricity origins from spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by the opposite displacements of bimetal atoms, and the full-d-orbital coinage metal elements cause larger displacements and polarization than other elements. For 2D ferroelectric metals, the odd electrons per unit cell without spin polarization may lead to a half-filled energy band around Fermi level and is responsible for the metallicity. It is revealed that the conducting electrons mainly move on a single-side surface of the 2D layer, while both the ionic and electric contributions to polarization come from the other side and are vertical to the above layer, thereby causing the coexistence of metallicity and ferroelectricity. Van der Waals heterostructures based on ferroelectric metals may enable the change of Schottky barrier height or the Schottky-Ohmic contact type and induce a dramatic change of their vertical transport properties. Our work greatly expands the family of 2D ferroelectric metals and will spur further exploration of 2D ferroelectric metals.
We systematically calculate the structure, formation enthalpy, formation free energy, elastic constants and electronic structure of Ti$_{0.98}$X$_{0.02}$ system by density functional theory (DFT) simulations to explore the effect of transition metal X (X=Ag, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Mo, Nb, Ni, Pd, Rh, Ru, Tc, and Zn) on the stability mechanism of $beta$-titanium. Based on our calculations, the results of formation enthalpy and free energy show that adding trace X is beneficial to the thermodynamic stability of $beta$-titanium. This behavior is well explained by the density of state (DOS). However, the tetragonal shear moduli of Ti$_{0.98}$X$_{0.02}$ systems are negative, indicating that $beta$-titanium doping with a low concentration of X is still elastically unstable at 0 K. Therefore, we theoretically explain that $beta$-titanium doping with trace transition metal X is unstable in the ground state.
We present an approach to generate machine-learned force fields (MLFF) with beyond density functional theory (DFT) accuracy. Our approach combines on-the-fly active learning and $Delta$-machine learning in order to generate an MLFF for zirconia based on the random phase approximation (RPA). Specifically, an MLFF trained on-the-fly during DFT based molecular dynamics simulations is corrected by another MLFF that is trained on the differences between RPA and DFT calculated energies, forces and stress tensors. Thanks to the relatively smooth nature of the differences, the expensive RPA calculations are performed only on a small number of representative structures of small unit cells. These structures are determined by a singular value decomposition rank compression of the kernel matrix with low spatial resolution. This dramatically reduces the computational cost and allows us to generate an MLFF fully capable of reproducing high-level quantum-mechanical calculations beyond DFT. We carefully validate our approach and demonstrate its success in studying the phase transitions of zirconia.
Two-dimensional (2D) multiferroics have been casted great attention owing to their promising prospects for miniaturized electronic and memory devices.Here, we proposed a highly stable 2D multiferroic, VOF monolayer, which is an intrinsic ferromagnetic half semiconductor with large spin polarization ~2 $mu_{B}/V$ atom and a significant uniaxial magnetic anisotropy along a-axis (410 $mu eV/V$ atom). Meanwhile, it shows excellent ferroelectricity with a large spontaneous polarization 32.7 $mu C/cm^{2}$ and a moderate energy barrier (~43 meV/atom) between two ferroelectric states, which can be ascribed to the Jahn-Teller distortion.Moreover, VOF monolayer harbors an ultra-large negative Poissons ratio in the in-plane direction (~-0.34). The Curie temperature evaluated from the Monte Carlo simulations based on the Ising model is about 215 K, which can be enhanced room temperature under -4% compressive biaxial strain.The combination of ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity in the VOF monolayer could provide a promising platform for future study of multiferroic effects and next-generation multifunctional nanoelectronic device applications.
As machine learning becomes increasingly important in engineering and science, it is inevitable that machine learning techniques will be applied to the investigation of materials, and in particular the structural phase transitions common in ferroelectric materials. Here, we build and train an artificial neural network to accurately predict the energy change associated with atom displacements and use the trained artificial neural network in Monte-Carlo simulations on ferroelectric materials to investigate their phase transitions. We apply this approach to two-dimensional monolayer SnTe and show that it can indeed be used to simulate the phase transitions and predict the transition temperature. The artificial neural network, when viewed as a universal mathematical structure, can be readily transferred to the investigation of other ferroelectric materials when training data generated with ab initio methods are available.