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The task of finding the smallest energy needed to bring a solid to its onset of mechanical instability arises in many problems in materials science, from the determination of the elasticity limit to the consistent assignment of free energies to mechanically unstable phases. However, unless the space of possible deformations is low-dimensional and a priori known, this problem is numerically difficult, as it involves minimizing a function under a constraint on its Hessian, which is computionally prohibitive to obtain in low symmetry systems, especially if electronic structure calculations are used. We propose a method that is inspired by the well-known dimer method for saddle point searches but that adds the necessary ingredients to solve for the lowest onset of mechanical instability. The method consists of two nested optimization problems. The inner one involves a dimer-like construction to find the direction of smallest curvature as well as the gradient of this curvature function. The outer optimization then minimizes energy using the result of the inner optimization problem to constrain the search to the hypersurface enclosing all points of zero minimum curvature. Example applications to both model systems and electronic structure calculations are given.
The modeling of the elastic properties of granular or nanoscale systems requires the foundations of the theory of elasticity to be revisited, as one explores scales at which this theory may no longer hold. The only cases for which a microscopic justi
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Molecular dynamics simulation is used to study the time-scales involved in the homogeneous melting of a superheated crystal. The interaction model used is an embedded-atom model for Fe developed in previous work, and the melting process is simulated
Is it possible to immediately distinguish a system made by an Avogadros number of identical elements and one with a single additional one? In this work, we show that a simple experiment can do so, yielding two qualitatively and quantitatively differe
A new finite-size scaling approach based on the transfer matrix method is developed to calculate the critical temperature of anisotropic two-layer Ising ferromagnet, on strips of r wide sites of square lattices. The reduced internal energy per site h