No Arabic abstract
Using the GW approximation, we study the electronic structure of the recently synthesized hydrogenated graphene, named graphane. For both conformations, the minimum band gap is found to be direct at the $Gamma$ point, and it has a value of 5.4 eV in the stable chair conformation, where H atoms attach C atoms alternatively on opposite sides of the two dimensional carbon network. In the meta-stable boat conformation the energy gap is 4.9 eV. Then, using a supercell approach, the electronic structure of graphane was modified by introducing either an hydroxyl group or an H vacancy. In this last case, an impurity state appears at about 2 eV above the valence band maximum.
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.
The outstanding optoelectronics and photovoltaic properties of metal halide perovskites, including high carrier motilities, low carrier recombination rates, and the tunable spectral absorption range are attributed to the unique electronic properties of these materials. While DFT provides reliable structures and stabilities of perovskites, it performs poorly in electronic structure prediction. The relativistic GW approximation has been demonstrated to be able to capture electronic structure accurately, but at an extremely high computational cost. Here we report efficient and accurate band gap calculations of halide metal perovskites by using the approximate quasiparticle DFT-1/2 method. Using AMX3 (A = CH3NH3, CH2NHCH2, Cs; M = Pb, Sn, X=I, Br, Cl) as demonstration, the influence of the crystal structure (cubic, tetragonal or orthorhombic), variation of ions (different A, M and X) and relativistic effects on the electronic structure are systematically studied and compared with experimental results. Our results show that the DFT-1/2 method yields accurate band gaps with the precision of the GW method with no more computational cost than standard DFT. This opens the possibility of accurate electronic structure prediction of sophisticated halide perovskite structures and new materials design for lead-free materials.
We report the band structures and excitonic properties of delafossites $CuMO_2$ (M = Al, Ga, In, Sc, Y, Cr) calculated using the state-of-the-art $textit{GW}$-BSE approach. We find that all the delafossites are indirect band gap semiconductors with large exciton binding energies, varying from 0.24 to 0.44 eV. The lowest and strongest exciton, mainly contributed from either Cu 3$textit{d}$ $rightarrow$ Cu 3$textit{p}$ (Al, Ga, In) or Cu 3$textit{d}$ $rightarrow$ M 3$textit{d}$ (M = Sc, Y, Cr) transitions, is always located at $L$ point of the rhombohedral Brillouin zone. Taking the electron-hole effect into account, our theoretical band gaps exhibit nice agreement with experiments.
We analyze a data set comprising 370 GW band structures composed of 61716 quasiparticle (QP) energies of two-dimensional (2D) materials spanning 14 crystal structures and 52 elements. The data results from PAW plane wave based one-shot G$_0$W$_0$@PBE calculations with full frequency integration. We investigate the distribution of key quantities like the QP self-energy corrections and renormalization factor $Z$ and explore their dependence on chemical composition and magnetic state. The linear QP approximation is identified as a significant error source and propose schemes for controlling and drastically reducing this error at low computational cost. We analyze the reliability of the $1/N_text{PW}$ basis set extrapolation and find that is well-founded with narrow distributions of $r^2$ peaked very close to 1. Finally, we explore the validity of the scissors operator approximation concluding that it is generally not valid for reasonable error tolerances. Our work represents a step towards the development of automatized workflows for high-throughput G$_0$W$_0$ band structure calculations for solids.
We have predicted a new phase of nitrogen with octagon structure in our previous study, which we referred to as octa-nitrogene (ON). In this work, we make further investigation on its electronic structure. The phonon band structure has no imaginary phonon modes, which indicates that ON is dynamically stable. Using ab initio molecular dynamic simulations, the structure is found to stable up to 100K, and ripples that are similar to that of graphene is formed on the ON sheet. Based on DFT calculation on its band structure, single layer ON is a 2D large-gap semiconductor with a band gap of 4.7eV. Because of inter-layer interaction, stackings can decrease the band gap. Biaxial tensile strain and perpendicular electric field can greatly influence the band structure of ON, in which the gap decreases and eventually closes as the biaxial tensile strain or the perpendicular electric field increases. In other words, both biaxial tensile strain and perpendicular electric field can drive the insulator-to-metal transition, and thus can be used to engineer the band gap of ON. From our results, ON has potential applications in the electronics, semiconductors, optics and spintronics, and so on.