In the present work, ternary Special Quasirandom Structures (SQSs) for a fcc solid solution phase are generated at different compositions, $x_A=x_B=x_C=tfrac{1}{3}$ and $x_A=tfrac{1}{2}$, $x_B=x_C=tfrac{1}{4}$, whose correlation functions are satisfa
ctorily close to those of a random fcc solution. The generated SQSs are used to calculate the mixing enthalpy of the fcc phase in the Ca-Sr-Yb system. It is observed that first-principles calculations of all the binary and ternary SQSs in the Ca-Sr-Yb system exhibit very small local relaxation. It is concluded that the fcc ternary SQSs can provide valuable information about the mixing behavior of the fcc ternary solid solution phase. The SQSs presented in this work can be widely used to study the behavior of ternary fcc solid solutions.
Phase stabilities of Hf-Si-O and Zr-Si-O have been studied with first-principles and thermodynamic modeling. From the obtained thermodynamic descriptions, phase diagrams pertinent to thin film processing were calculated. We found that the relative st
ability of the metal silicates with respect to their binary oxides plays a critical role in silicide formation. It was observed that both the HfO$_2$/Si and ZrO$_2$/Si interfaces are stable in a wide temperature range and silicide may form at low temperatures, partially at the HfO$_2$/Si interface.
The Hf-O system has been modeled by combining existing experimental data and first-principles calculations results through the CALPHAD approach. Special quasirandom structures of $alpha$ and $beta$ hafnium were generated to calculate the mixing behav
ior of oxygen and vacancies. For the total energy of oxygen, vibrational, rotational and translational degrees of freedom were considered. The Hf-O system was combined with previously modeled Hf-Si and Si-O systems, and the ternary compound in the Hf-Si-O system, HfSiO$_4$ has been introduced to calculate the stability diagrams pertinent to the thin film processing.
Three different special quasirandom structures (SQS) of the substitutional hcp $A_{1-x}B_x$ binary random solutions ($x=0.25$, 0.5, and 0.75) are presented. These structures are able to mimic the most important pair and multi-site correlation functio
ns corresponding to perfectly random hcp solutions at those compositions. Due to the relatively small size of the generated structures, they can be used to calculate the properties of random hcp alloys via first-principles methods. The structures are relaxed in order to find their lowest energy configurations at each composition. In some cases, it was found that full relaxation resulted in complete loss of their parental symmetry as hcp so geometry optimizations in which no local relaxations are allowed were also performed. In general, the first-principles results for the seven binary systems (Cd-Mg, Mg-Zr, Al-Mg, Mo-Ru, Hf-Ti, Hf-Zr, and Ti-Zr) show good agreement with both formation enthalpy and lattice parameters measurements from experiments. It is concluded that the SQSs presented in this work can be widely used to study the behavior of random hcp solutions.
