No Arabic abstract
The anomalous plasmon linewidth dispersion (PLD) measured in K by vom Felde, Sprosser-Prou, and Fink (Phys. Rev. B 40, 10181 (1989)), has been attributed to strong dynamical electron-electron correlations. On the basis of ab initio response calculations, and detailed comparison with experiment, we show that the PLD of K is, in fact, dominated by decay into particle-hole excitations involving empty states of d-symmetry. For Li, we shed new light on the physics of the PLD. Our all-electron results illustrate the importance of ab initio methods for the study of electronic excitations.
It is generally accepted that the effective magnetic field acting on a magnetic moment is given by the gradient of the energy with respect to the magnetization. However, in ab initio spin dynamics within the adiabatic approximation, the effective field is also known to be exactly the negative of the constraining field, which acts as a Lagrange multiplier to stabilize an out-of-equilibrium, non-collinear magnetic configuration. We show that for Hamiltonians without mean-field parameters both of these fields are exactly equivalent, while there can be a finite difference for mean-field Hamiltonians. For density-functional theory (DFT) calculations the constraining field obtained from the auxiliary Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian is not exactly equivalent to the DFT energy gradient. This inequality is highly relevant for both ab initio spin dynamics and the ab initio calculation of exchange constants and effective magnetic Hamiltonians. We argue that the effective magnetic field and exchange constants have the highest accuracy in DFT when calculated from the energy gradient and not from the constraining field.
First-principles calculation predict that olivine Li4MnFeCoNiP4O16 has ferrotoroidic characteristic and ferrimagnetic configuration with magnetic moment of 1.56 muB per formula unit. The ferrotoroidicity of this material makes it a potential candidate for magnetoelectric materials . Based on the orbital-resolved density of states for the transtion-metal ions in Li4MnFeCoNiP4O16, the spin configuration for Mn2+,Fe3+,Co2+, and Ni2+ is t2g3eg2, t2g3eg2,t2g1t2g3eg1eg2, and t2g2t2g3eg1eg2, respectively. Density functional theory plus U (DFT+U) shows a indirect band gap of 1.25 eV in this predicted material, which is not simply related to the electronic conductivity in terms of being used as cathode material in rechargeable Li-ion batteries.
We report ab initio calculations of the melting curve of molybdenum for the pressure range 0-400 GPa. The calculations employ density functional theory (DFT) with the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof exchange-correlation functional in the projector augmented wave (PAW) implementation. We present tests showing that these techniques accurately reproduce experimental data on low-temperature b.c.c. Mo, and that PAW agrees closely with results from the full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave implementation. The work attempts to overcome the uncertainties inherent in earlier DFT calculations of the melting curve of Mo, by using the ``reference coexistence technique to determine the melting curve. In this technique, an empirical reference model (here, the embedded-atom model) is accurately fitted to DFT molecular dynamics data on the liquid and the high-temperature solid, the melting curve of the reference model is determined by simulations of coexisting solid and liquid, and the ab initio melting curve is obtained by applying free-energy corrections. Our calculated melting curve agrees well with experiment at ambient pressure and is consistent with shock data at high pressure, but does not agree with the high pressure melting curve deduced from static compression experiments. Calculated results for the radial distribution function show that the short-range atomic order of the liquid is very similar to that of the high-T solid, with a slight decrease of coordination number on passing from solid to liquid. The electronic densities of states in the two phases show only small differences. The results do not support a recent theory according to which very low dTm/dP values are expected for b.c.c. transition metals because of electron redistribution between s-p and d states.
We study the general problem of mixing for ab-initio quantum-mechanical problems. Guided by general mathematical principles and the underlying physics, we propose a multisecant form of Broydens second method for solving the self-consistent field equations of Kohn-Sham density functional theory. The algorithm is robust, requires relatively little finetuning and appears to outperform the current state of the art, converging for cases that defeat many other methods. We compare our technique to the conventional methods for problems ranging from simple to nearly pathological.
We revisit the well-known Mollwo-Ivey relation that describes the universal dependence of the absorption energies of F-type color centers on the lattice constant $a$ of the alkali-halide crystals, $E_{mbox{abs}}propto a^{-n}.$ We perform both state-of-the-art ab-initio Quantum Chemistry and post-DFT calculations of F-center absorption spectra. By tuning independently the lattice constant and the atomic species we show that the scaling of the lattice constant alone (keeping the elements fixed) would yield $n=2$ in agreement with the particle-in-the-box model. Keeping the lattice constant fixed and changing the atomic species enables us to quantify the ion-size effects which are shown to be responsible for the exponent $n approx 1.8$.