Pascal Thomas Salzbrenner,
Se Hun Joo,
Lewis J Conway,
Peter I C Cooke,
Bonan Zhu,
Milosz P Matraszek,
William Charles Witt,
Chris J Pickard
- Machine-learned interatomic potentials are fast becoming an indispensable tool in computational materials science. One approach is the ephemeral data-derived potential (EDDP), which was designed to accelerate atomistic structure prediction. The EDDP is simple and cost-efficient. It relies on training data generated in small unit cells and is fit using a lightweight neural network, leading to smooth interactions which exhibit the robust transferability essential for structure prediction. Here, we present a variety of applications of EDDPs, enabled by recent developments of the open-source EDDP software. New features include interfaces to phonon and molecular dynamics codes, as well as deployment of the ensemble deviation for estimating the confidence in EDDP predictions. Through case studies ranging from elemental carbon and lead to the binary scandium hydride and the ternary zinc cyanide, we demonstrate that EDDPs can be trained to cover wide ranges of pressures and ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 28, 2023
Anees Pazhedath,
Lorenzo Bastonero,
Nicola Marzari,
Michele Simoncelli
- Alloys based on lanthanum phosphate (LaPO₄) are often employed as thermal barrier coatings, due to their low thermal conductivity and structural stability over a wide temperature range. To enhance the thermal-insulation performance of these alloys, it is essential to comprehensively understand the fundamental physics governing their heat conduction. Here, we employ the Wigner formulation of thermal transport in conjunction with first-principles calculations to elucidate how the interplay between anharmonicity and compositional disorder determines the thermal properties of La1-xGdxPO₄ alloys, and discuss the fundamental physics underlying the emergence and coexistence of particle-like and wave-like heat-transport mechanisms. Our predictions for microscopic vibrational properties (temperature-dependent Raman spectrum) and for macroscopic thermal conductivity are validated against experiments. Finally, we leverage these findings to devise strategies to optimize the performance of thermal barrier coatings.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 27, 2023
Norma Rivano,
Nicola Marzari,
Thibault Sohier
- Dimensionality provides a clear fingerprint on the dispersion of infrared-active, polar-optical phonons. For these phonons, the local dipoles parametrized by the Born effective charges drive the LO-TO splitting of bulk materials; this splitting actually breaks down in two-dimensional materials. Here, we develop the theory for one-dimensional (1D) systems -nanowires, nanotubes, and atomic and polymeric chains. Combining an analytical model with the implementation of density-functional perturbation theory in 1D boundary conditions, we show that the dielectric splitting in the dispersion relations collapses as x²log(x) at the zone center. The dielectric properties and the radius of the 1D materials are linked by the present work to these red shifts, opening infrared and Raman characterization avenues.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 27, 2023
SImon Gramatte,
Vladyslav Turlo
- In this study, we benchmarked various interatomic potentials and force fields in comparison to an ab initio dataset for bulk amorphous alumina. We investigated a comprehensive set of fixed-charge and variable-charge potentials tailored for alumina. We also train a machine learning interatomic potential, using the NequIP framework. Results highlight that the fixed-charge potential by Matsui provides an ideal blend of computational speed and alignment with ab initio findings for stoichiometric alumina. For non-stoichiometric variants, the variable charge potentials, especially ReaxFF, align remarkably well with DFT outcomes. The NequIP ML potential, while superior in some instances and adaptable, might not be the best fit for specific tasks.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 26, 2023
Jan Berges,
Nina Girotto,
Tim Wehling,
Nicola Marzari,
Samuel Poncé
- First-principles calculations of phonons are often based on the adiabatic approximation and on Brillouin-zone samplings that might not always be sufficient to capture the subtleties of Kohn anomalies. These shortcomings can be addressed through corrections to the phonon self-energy arising from the low-energy electrons. The exact self-energy involves a product of a bare and a screened electron-phonon vertex [Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, 015003 (2017)]; still, calculations often employ two adiabatically screened vertices, which have been proposed as a reliable approximation for self-energy differences [Phys. Rev. B 82, 165111 (2010)]. We assess the accuracy of both approaches in estimating the phonon spectral functions of model Hamiltonians and the adiabatic low-temperature phonon dispersions of monolayer TaS₂ and doped MoS₂. We find that the approximate method yields excellent corrections at low computational cost, due to its designed error cancellation to first order, while using a bare ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Sep 21, 2023
Lucas Clarte,
Bruno Loureiro,
Florent Krzakala,
Lenka Zdeborova
- Uncertainty quantification is a central challenge in reliable and trustworthy machine learning. Naive measures such as last-layer scores are well-known to yield overconfident estimates in the context of overparametrized neural networks. Several methods, ranging from temperature scaling to different Bayesian treatments of neural networks, have been proposed to mitigate overconfidence, most often supported by the numerical observation that they yield better calibrated uncertainty measures. In this work, we provide a sharp comparison between popular uncertainty measures for binary classification in a mathematically tractable model for overparametrized neural networks: the random features model. We discuss a trade-off between classification accuracy and calibration, unveiling a double descent like behavior in the calibration curve of optimally regularized estimators as a function of overparametrization. This is in contrast with the empirical Bayes method, which we show to be well ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 19, 2023
Lucas Clarte,
Bruno Loureiro,
Florent Krzakala,
Lenka Zdeborova
- Despite their incredible performance, it is well reported that deep neural networks tend to be overoptimistic about their prediction confidence. Finding effective and efficient calibration methods for neural networks is therefore an important endeavour towards better uncertainty quantification in deep learning. In this manuscript, we introduce a novel calibration technique named expectation consistency (EC), consisting of a post-training rescaling of the last layer weights by enforcing that the average validation confidence coincides with the average proportion of correct labels. First, we show that the EC method achieves similar calibration performance to temperature scaling (TS) across different neural network architectures and data sets, all while requiring similar validation samples and computational resources. However, we argue that EC provides a principled method grounded on a Bayesian optimality principle known as the Nishimori identity. Next, we provide an asymptotic ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 19, 2023
Volkmar Koller,
Pablo G. Lustemberg,
Alexander Spriewald-Luciano,
Sabrina M. Gericke,
Alfred Larsson,
Christian Sack,
Alexei Preobrajenski,
Edvin Lundgren,
M. Veronica Ganduglia-Pirovano,
Herbert Over
- The catalytic oxidation of HCl by molecular oxygen (Deacon process) over ceria allows the recovery of molecular chlorine from omnipresent HCl waste produced in various industrial processes. In previous density functional theory (DFT) model calculations by Amrute et al. [J. Catal. 2012, 286, 287–297.], it was proposed that the most critical reaction step in this process is the displacement of tightly bound chlorine at a vacant oxygen position on the CeO2(111) surface (Clvac) toward a less strongly bound cerium on-top (Cltop) position. This step is highly endothermic by more than 2 eV. On the basis of a dedicated model study, namely the re-oxidation of a chlorinated single crystalline Clvac-CeO2−x(111)-(√3 × √3)R30° surface structure, we provide in-situ synchrotron-based spectroscopic data (high-resolution core level spectroscopy (HRCLS) and X-ray adsorption near edge structure (XANES)) for this oxygen-induced de-chlorination process. Combined with theoretical evidence from DFT ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 19, 2023
Kevin Janßen,
Philipp Rüßmann,
Sergej Liberda,
Michael Schleenvoigt,
Xiao Hou,
Abdur Rehman Jalil,
Florian Lentz,
Stefan Trellenkamp,
Benjamin Bennemann,
Erik Zimmermann,
Gregor Mussler,
Peter Schüffelgen,
Claus-Michael Schneider,
Stefan Blügel,
Detlev Grützmacher,
Lukasz Plucinski,
Thomas Schäpers
- With increasing interest in Majorana physics for possible quantum bit applications, a large interest has been developed to understand the properties of the interface between a s-type superconductor and a topological insulator. Up to this point the interface analysis was mainly focused on in-situ prepared Josephson junctions, which consist of two coupled single interfaces or to ex-situ fabricated single interface devices. In our work we utilize a novel fabrication process, combining selective area growth and shadow evaporation which allows the characterization of a single in-situ fabricated Nb/(Bi0.15Sb0.85)2Te3 nano interface. The resulting high interface transparency, is apparent by a zero bias conductance increase by a factor of 1.7. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive differential conductance analysis of our single in-situ interface for various magnetic fields, temperatures and gate voltages. Additionally, density functional ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Sep 19, 2023
Luca Schaufelberger,
Maximilian E. Merkel,
Aria Mansouri Tehrani,
Nicola A. Spaldin,
Claude Ederer
- We present a method to constrain local charge multipoles within density-functional theory. Such multipoles quantify the anisotropy of the local charge distribution around atomic sites and can indicate potential hidden orders. Our method allows selective control of specific multipoles, facilitating a quantitative exploration of the energetic landscape outside of local minima. Thus, it enables a clear distinction between electronically and structurally driven instabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by applying it to charge quadrupoles in the prototypical orbitally ordered material KCuF₃. We quantify intersite multipole-multipole interactions as well as the energy-lowering related to the formation of an isolated local quadrupole. We also map out the energy as a function of the size of the local quadrupole moment around its local minimum, enabling quantification of multipole fluctuations around their equilibrium value. Finally, we study charge quadrupoles in the ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 15, 2023
Luigi Giacomazzi,
Nikita S. Shcheblanov,
Mikhail E. Povarnitsyn,
Yanbo Li,
Andraž Mavrič,
Barbara Zupančič,
Jože Grdadolnik,
Alfredo Pasquarello
- We present a combined study based on experimental measurements of infrared (IR) dielectric function and first-principles calculations of IR spectra and vibrational density of states (VDOS) of amorphous alumina (am-Al₂O₃). In particular, we show that the main features of the imaginary part of the dielectric function ε₂(ω) at ~380 and 630 cm-¹ are related to the motions of threefold coordinated oxygen atoms, which are the vast majority of oxygen atoms in am-Al₂O₃. Our analysis (involving three model structures) provides an alternative point of view with respect to an earlier suggested assignment of the vibrational modes, which relates them to the stretching and bending vibrational modes of AlOₙ (n = 4, 5, and 6) polyhedra. Our assignment is based on the additive decomposition of the VDOS and ε₂(ω) spectra, which shows that: (i) the band at ~380 cm-¹ features oxygen motions occurring in a direction normal to the plane defined by the three nearest-neighbor aluminum atoms, i.e. ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 14, 2023
Oliviero Cannelli,
Julia Wiktor,
Nicola Colonna,
Ludmila Leroy,
Michele Puppin,
Camila Bacellar,
Ilia Sadykov,
Franziska Krieg,
Grigory Smolentsev,
Maksym V. Kovalenko,
Alfredo Pasquarello,
Majed Chergui,
Giulia F. Mancini
- The potential of lead-halide perovskites for realistic applications is currently hindered by their limited long-term stability under functional activation. While the role of lattice flexibility in the thermal response of perovskites has become increasingly evident, the description of thermally-induced distortions is still unclear. In this work, we provide a unified picture of thermal activation in CsPbBr₃ across length scales, showing that lattice symmetry does not increase at high temperatures. We combine temperature-dependent XRD, Br K-edge XANES, ab initio MD simulations, and calculations of the XANES spectra by first-principles, accounting for both thermal fluctuations and core hole final state effects. We find that the octahedral tilting of the Pb-Br inorganic framework statistically adopts multiple local configurations over time - in the short-range. In turn, the stochastic nature of the local thermal fluctuations uplifts the longer-range periodic octahedral tilting ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 14, 2023
Enrico Marazzi,
Ali Ghojavand,
Jérémie Pirard,
Guido Petretto,
Jean-Christophe Charlier,
Gian-Marco Rignanese
- Recently, a process has been proposed for generating negatively-curved carbon schwarzites via zeolite-templating (Braun et al., 2018). However, the proposed process leads to atomistic models which are not very symmetric and often rather defective. In the present work, an improved generation approach is developed, by imposing symmetry constraints, which systematically leads to defect-free, hence more stable, schwarzites. The stability of the newly predicted symmetric schwarzites is also compared to that of other carbon nanostructures (in particular carbon nanotubes - CNTs), which could also be accommodated within the same templates. Our results suggest that only a few of these (such as FAU, SBT and SBS) can fit schwarzites more stable than CNTs. Our predictions could help experimentalists in the crucial choice of the template for the challenging synthesis of schwarzites. Furthermore, being highly symmetric and stable phases, the models could also be synthesized by means of other experimental procedures.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 07, 2023
Brenda S. Ferrari,
Matteo Manica,
Ronaldo Giro,
Teodoro Laino,
Mathias B. Steiner
- Polymers are candidate materials for a wide range of sustainability applications such as carbon capture and energy storage. However, computational polymer discovery lacks automated analysis of reaction pathways and stability assessment through retro-synthesis. Here, we report the first extension of transformer-based language models to polymerization reactions for both forward and retrosynthesis tasks. We curated a polymerization dataset for vinyl polymers covering reactions and retrosynthesis for representative homo-polymers and co-polymers. Overall, we report a forward model accuracy of 80% and a backward model accuracy of 60%. We further analyse the model performance on a set of case studies by providing polymerization and retro-synthesis examples and evaluating the model’s predictions quality from a materials science perspective.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 06, 2023
Harry Handoko Halim,
Ryo Ueda,
Yoshitada Morikawa
- The behavior of adsorbate-induced surface transformation can be clearly understood given the mechanical aspects of such phenomenon are well described at the atomic level. In this study, we provide the atomic-level description on the formation of Cu clusters on the Cu(111) surface by performing set of molecular dynamics simulations driven by machine-learning force-field. The machine learning technique called Gaussian Process (GP), as implemented in FLARE v1.1.2 (https://github.com/mir-group/flare/tree/1.1.2) was used to construct the machine-learning force-field. The dynamics simulations were performed using LAMMPS v29Sept2021 (https://github.com/lammps/lammps/tree/stable_29Sep2021_update2). This archive contains some supplementary data including the validation structures and also the MGP potential used to drive the MD simulations in LAMMPS. Additionally, the GP potential (before mapping) containing the database of atomic environment is also made available.
The simulations at 450 ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Sep 05, 2023
Rui Zeng,
Ming Zhang,
Xiaodong Wang,
Lei Zhu,
Bonan Hao,
Wenkai Zhong,
Guanqing Zhou,
Jiaxing Zhuang,
Anyang Zhang,
Fei Han,
Zichun Zhou,
Xiaonan Xue,
Shengjie Xu,
Jinqiu Xu,
Yahui Liu,
Hao Lu,
Xuefei Wu,
Cheng Wang,
Zachary Fink,
Thomas P. Russell,
Hao Jing,
Yongming Zhang,
Zhishan Bo,
Feng Liu
- Nonfused ring electron acceptors (NFREAs) are interesting n-type near infrared (NIR) photoactive semiconductors with strong molecular absorption and easy synthetic route. However, the low backbone planarity and bulky substitution make NFREA less crystalline, which significantly retards charge transport and the formation of bicontinuous morphology in organic photovoltaic device. Donor and acceptor solubility in different solvents is studied, and the created solubility hysteresis can induce the formation of the highly crystalline donor polymer fibril to purify the NFREA phase, thus a better bicontinuous morphology with improved crystallinity. Based on these results, a general solubility hysteresis sequential condensation (SHSC) thin film fabrication methodology is established to produce highly uniform and smooth photoactive layer. The well-defined interpenetrating network morphology afforded a record efficiency of 19.02%, which is ~22% improvement comparing to conventional device ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 31, 2023
Javier Fernandez Troncoso,
Giacomo Lorenzin,
Claudia Cancellieri,
Vladyslav Turlo
- Thermal annealing experiments evidence opposite effect on the degradation kinetics of Cu/W nano-multilayers from compressive to tensile in-plane strain. Besides higher activation energy, nano-multilayers with tensile strains degrade to nanocomposites faster than those with compressive strains. By assuming a vacancy-driven diffusion mechanism of degradation, we applied ab initio calculations to quantify different contributions to the corresponding diffusion coefficients in relation to in-plane strain. The average vacancy formation energy increases as the strain changes from compressive to tensile, which explains the higher experimental activation energy. The bulk in-plane and out-of-plane vacancy migration energies and corresponding diffusion prefactors highlight that enhanced transformation rate under tension can be explained by the segregation of non-equilibrium W vacancies to Cu/W interfaces. Our thermodynamic evaluation of grain boundary wetting and grooving by hybrid ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 31, 2023
Stefaan Cottenier
- The widespread popularity of density functional theory has given rise to an extensive range of dedicated codes for predicting molecular and crystalline properties. However, each code implements the formalism in a different way, raising questions about the reproducibility of such predictions. In K. Lejaeghere et al., Science 351 (6280), aad3000 (2016) (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad3000), we reported the results of a community-wide effort that compared 15 solid-state codes, using 40 different potentials or basis set types, to assess the quality of the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof equations of state for 71 elemental crystals. We conclude that predictions from recent codes and pseudopotentials agree very well, with pairwise differences that are comparable to those between different high-precision experiments. Older methods, however, have less precise agreement. Our benchmark provides a framework for users and developers to document the precision of new applications and methodological ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 29, 2023
Tobias Esswein,
Nicola A. Spaldin
- Motivated by the recent experimental discovery of strongly surface-plane-dependent superconductivity at surfaces of KTaO3 single crystals, we calculate the electron-phonon coupling strength, λ, of doped KTaO3 along the reciprocal-space high-symmetry directions. Using the Wannier-function approach implemented in the EPW package, we calculate λ across the experimentally covered doping range and compare its mode-resolved distribution along the [001], [110] and [111] reciprocal-space directions. We find that the electron-phonon coupling is strongest in the optical modes around the Γ point, with some distribution to higher k values in the [001] direction. The electron-phonon coupling strength as a function of doping has a dome-like shape in all three directions and its integrated total is largest in the [001] direction and smallest in the [111] direction, in contrast to the experimentally measured trends in critical temperatures. This disagreement points to a non-BCS character of the ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Aug 28, 2023
Jiaqi Zhou,
Samuel Poncé,
Jean-Christophe Charlier
- Spin Hall effect (SHE) plays a critical role in spintronics since it can convert charge current to spin current. Using state-of-the-art ab initio calculations including quadrupole and spin-orbit coupling, the charge and spin transports have been investigated in pristine and doped two-dimensional (2D) III-V semiconductors. Valence bands induce a strong scattering which limits charge conductivity in the hole-doped system, where spin Hall conductivity is enhanced by the spin-orbit splitting, yielding an ultrahigh spin Hall ratio 𝜉≈0.9 in GaAs monolayer at room temperature.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 25, 2023
Chuntian Cao,
Matthew R. Carbone,
Jagriti S. Shekhawat,
Cem Komurcuoglu,
Haoyue Guo,
Shinjae Yoo,
Nongnuch Artrith,
Alexander Urban,
Deyu Lu
- This database contains phosphorus and sulfur K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) of delithiated Lithium-Phosphorus-Sulfur compounds. The structures were generated by a computational delithiation procedure of β-Li3PS4 with density functional theory calculations, where we systematically enumerated distinct lithium/vacancy orderings in the super cells with the general composition Li12-xP4S16 (i.e., four Li3PS4 formula units and x from 0 to 12). The database contains a total of 2227 P K-edge and 8885 S K-edge XANES spectra of symmetrically inequivalent absorbing P and S sites. The XANES spectra were calculated using the excited electron and core hole method as implemented in The Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) 6.2.1. Details of the structure generation procedure as well as the VASP simulations can be found in the associated manuscript (see reference below).
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 23, 2023
Davide Grassano,
Nicola Marzari,
Davide Campi
- Topological Weyl semimetals represent a novel class of non-trivial materials, where band crossings with linear dispersions take place at generic momenta across reciprocal space. These crossings give rise to low-energy properties akin to those of Weyl fermions, and are responsible for several exotic phenomena. Up to this day, only a handful of Weyl semimetals have been discovered, and the search for new ones remains a very active area. The main challenge on the computational side arises from the fact that many of the tools used to identify the topological class of a material do not provide a complete picture in the case of Weyl semimetals. In this work, we propose an alternative and inexpensive, criterion to screen for possible Weyl fermions, based on the analysis of the band structure along high-symmetry directions in the absence of spin-orbit coupling. We test the method by running a high-throughput screening on a set of 6000 inorganic bulk materials and identify 49 possible ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Aug 22, 2023
Samuel Beaulieu,
Shuo Dong,
Viktor Christiansson,
Philipp Werner,
Tommaso Pincelli,
Jonas D. Ziegler,
Takashi Taniguchi,
Kenji Watanabe,
Alexey Chernikov,
Martin Wolf,
Laurenz Rettig,
Ralph Ernstorfer,
Michael Schüler
- The topology of the electronic band structure of solids can be described by its Berry curvature distribution across the Brillouin zone. We theoretically introduce and experimentally demonstrate a general methodology based on the measurement of energy- and momentum-resolved optical transition rates, allowing to reveal signatures of Berry curvature texture in reciprocal space. By performing time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of atomically thin WSe₂ using polarization-modulated excitations, we demonstrate that excitons become an asset in extracting the quantum geometrical properties of solids. We also investigate the resilience of our measurement protocol against ultrafast scattering processes following direct chiroptical transitions.
Here we provide the data presented in the paper referenced below. The data set contains the results of the first-principle calculations of the exciton properties, python scripts for solving the real-time dynamics, and python scripts for ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 18, 2023
Frederick Stein,
Jürg Hutter
- The Random-Phase approximation (RPA) provides an appealing framework for semi-local density functional theory. In its current formulation, it is cost-effective and has a better scaling behaviour compared to other wavefunction based correlation methods. To broaden the application field for RPA, it is necessary to have first order properties available. RPA nuclear gradients allow for structure optimizations and data sampling for machine learning applications. We report on an efficient implementation of RPA nuclear gradients for massively parallel computers. We apply the implementation to two polymorphs of the benzene crystal obtaining very good cohesive and relative energies. Different correction and extrapolation schemes are investigated for further improvement of the results and in order to estimate error bars.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 17, 2023
Paolo Pegolo,
Stefano Baroni,
Federico Grasselli
- The dynamics of (few) electrons dissolved in an ionic fluid—as when a small amount of metal is added to a solution while upholding its electronic insulation—manifests interesting properties that can be ascribed to nontrivial topological features of particle transport (e.g., Thouless' pumps). In the adiabatic regime, the charge distribution and the dynamics of these dissolved electrons are uniquely determined by the nuclear configuration. Yet, their localization into effective potential wells and their diffusivity are dictated by how the self-interaction is modeled. In this article, we investigate the role of self-interaction in the description of localization and transport properties of dissolved electrons in non-stoichiometric molten salts. Although the account for the exact (Fock) exchange strongly localizes the dissolved electrons, decreasing their tunneling probability and diffusivity, we show that the dynamics of the ions and of the dissolved electrons are largely ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 15, 2023
J. Terence Blaskovits,
R. Laplaza,
S. Vela,
C. Corminboeuf
- The high-throughput molecular exploration and screening of organic electronic materials often starts with either a 'top-down' mining of existing repositories, or the 'bottom-up' assembly of fragments based on predetermined rules and known synthetic templates. In both instances, the datasets used are often produced on a case-by-case basis, and require the high-quality computation of electronic properties and extensive user input: curation in the top-down approach, and the construction of a fragment library and introduction of rules for linking them in the bottom-up approach. Both approaches are time-consuming and require significant computational resources. Here, we generate a top-down set named FORMED consisting of 117K synthesized molecules containing their optimized structures, associated electronic and topological properties and chemical composition, and use these structures as a vast library of molecular building blocks for bottom-up fragment-based materials design. A tool is ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Aug 10, 2023
Davide Grassano,
Luca Binci,
Nicola Marzari
- Topological materials have been a main focus of studies in the past decade due to their protected properties that can be exploited for the fabrication of new devices. Among them, Weyl semimetals are a class of topological semimetals with non-trivial linear band crossing close to the Fermi level. The existence of such crossings requires the breaking of either time-reversal or inversion symmetry and is responsible for the exotic physical properties. In this work we identify the full-Heusler compound InMnTi₂, as a promising, easy to synthesize, T- and I-breaking Weyl semimetal. This material exhibits several features that are comparatively more intriguing with respect to other known Weyl semimetals: the distance between two neighboring nodes is large enough to observe a wide range of linear dispersions in the bands, and only one kind of such node's pairs is present in the Brillouin zone. We also show the presence of Fermi arcs stable across a wide range of chemical potentials. ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Aug 03, 2023
Casey E. Beall,
Emiliana Fabbri,
Adam H. Clark,
Vivian Meier,
Nur Sena Yüzbasi,
Benjamin H. Sjølin,
Ivano E. Castelli,
Dino Aegerter,
Thomas Graule,
Thomas J. Schmidt
- In a unified regenerative fuel cell (URFC) or reversible fuel cell the oxygen bifunctional catalyst must switch reversibly between the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), fuel cell mode, and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), electrolyzer mode. However, it is often unclear what effect alternating between ORR and OER has on the electrochemical behavior and physiochemical properties of the catalyst. Herein, operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is utilized to monitor the continuous and dynamic evolution of the Co, Mn, and Fe oxidation states of perovskite catalysts Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3-δ (BSCF) and La0.4Sr0.6MnO3-δ (LSM), while the potential is oscillated between reducing and oxidizing potentials with cyclic voltammetry. The results reveal the importance of investigating bifunctional catalysts by alternating between fuel cell and electrolyzer operation and highlight the limitations and challenges of bifunctional catalysts. It is shown that the requirements for ORR and OER ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 28, 2023
Alfredo Fiorentino,
Paolo Pegolo,
Stefano Baroni
- In the past few years, the theory of thermal transport in amorphous solids has been substantially extended beyond the Allen-Feldman model. The resulting formulation, based on the Green-Kubo linear response or the Wigner-transport equation, bridges this model for glasses with the traditional Boltzmann kinetic approach for crystals. The computational effort required by these methods usually scales as the cube of the number of atoms, thus severely limiting the size range of computationally affordable glass models. Leveraging hydrodynamic arguments, we show how this issue can be overcome through a simple formula to extrapolate a reliable estimate of the bulk thermal conductivity of glasses from finite models of moderate size. We showcase our findings for realistic models of paradigmatic glassy materials.
This repository contains example inputs to compute the hydrodynamic extrapolation of the thermal conductivity of glasses.
Explicit examples are for amorphous silicon. Optimized atomic ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 28, 2023
Mario Zauchner,
Johannes Lischner,
Andrew Horsfield
- The GW approach produces highly accurate quasiparticle energies, but its application to large systems is computationally challenging, which can be largely attributed to the difficulty in computing the inverse dielectric matrix. To address this challenge, we develop a machine learning approach to efficiently predict density-density response functions (DDRF) in materials. For this, an atomic decomposition of the DDRF is introduced as well as the neighbourhood density-matrix descriptor both of which transform in the same way under rotations. The resulting DDRFs are then used to evaluate quasiparticle energies via the GW approach. This technique is called the ML-GW approach. To assess the accuracy of this method, we apply it to hydrogenated silicon clusters and find that it reliably reproduces HOMO-LUMO gaps and quasiparticle energy levels. The accuracy of the predictions deteriorates when the approach is applied to larger clusters than those included in the training set. These ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Jul 27, 2023
Lorenzo Bastonero,
Nicola Marzari
- Infrared and Raman spectroscopies are ubiquitous techniques employed in many experimental laboratories, thanks to their fast and non-destructive nature able to capture materials' features as spectroscopic fingerprints. Nevertheless, these measurements frequently need theoretical support in order to unambiguously decipher and assign complex spectra. Linear-response theory provides an effective way to obtain the higher-order derivatives needed, but its applicability to modern exchange-correlation functionals remains limited. Here, we devise an automated, open-source, user-friendly approach based on ground-state density-functional theory and the electric enthalpy functional to allow seamless calculations of first-principles infrared and Raman spectra. By employing a finite-displacement and finite-field approach, we allow for the use of any functional, as well as an efficient treatment of large low-symmetry structures. Additionally, we propose a simple scheme for efficiently sampling ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 27, 2023
Junfeng Qiao,
Giovanni Pizzi,
Nicola Marzari
- Maximally-localized Wannier functions (MLWFs) are a powerful and broadly used tool to characterize the electronic structure of materials, from chemical bonding to dielectric response to topological properties. Most generally, one can construct MLWFs that describe isolated band manifolds, e.g. for the valence bands of insulators, or entangled band manifolds, e.g. in metals or describing both the valence and the conduction manifolds in insulators. Obtaining MLWFs that describe a target manifold accurately and with the most compact representation often requires chemical intuition and trial and error, a challenging step even for experienced researchers and a roadblock for automated high-throughput calculations. Here, we present a very natural and powerful approach that provides automatically MLWFs spanning the occupied bands and their natural complement for the empty states, resulting in WÎannier Hamiltonian models that provide a tight-binding picture of optimized atomic orbitals in ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Jul 27, 2023
Elena Gazzarrini,
Rose K. Cersonsky,
Marnik Bercx,
Carl S. Adorf,
Nicola Marzari
- Why are materials with specific characteristics more abundant than others?
This is a fundamental question in materials science and one that is traditionally difficult to tackle, given the vastness of compositional and configurational space. We highlight here the anomalous abundance of inorganic compounds whose primitive unit cell contains a number of atoms that is a multiple of four. This occurrence - named here the 'rule of four' - has to our knowledge not previously been reported or studied. Here, we first highlight the rule's existence, especially notable when restricting oneself to experimentally known compounds, and explore its possible relationship with established descriptors of crystal structures, from symmetries to energies. We then investigate this relative abundance by looking at structural descriptors, both of global (packing configurations) and local (the smooth overlap of atomic positions) nature. Contrary to intuition, the overabundance does not correlate with ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Jul 27, 2023
Margaret Berrens,
Zekun Chen,
Kam-Tung Chan,
Cort Anastasio,
Davide Donadio
- Nitrate is a significant contaminant in Polar snow. Its photolysis in environmental sunlight generates reactive nitrogen, which impacts the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere, influencing the fate and lifetimes of pollutants. The photolysis of nitrate can produce either NO2 or NO2- , with recent experiments suggesting that the process is accelerated at the air-ice interface compared to the bulk solution. In this study, we employed multiscale modeling approaches to investigate the enhanced photoreactivity of nitrate at the ice surface in the presence of two different cations. We characterized the solvation shell of NO3- and explored its pairing with cations in water and ice using ab initio molecular dynamics and enhanced sampling. Molecular trajectories were used to calculate light absorption spectra at different solvation conditions and finite temperature. Our analysis revealed that the pairing of nitrate with cations may alter the molar absorption coefficient of nitrate at the ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 26, 2023
Chiara Ricca,
Elizabeth Skoropata,
Marta D. Rossell,
Rolf Erni,
Urs Staub,
Ulrich Aschauer
- Recently a highly ordered Moiré dislocation lattice was identified at the interface between a SrTiO₃ (STO) thin film and the (LaAlO₃)₀.₃(Sr₂TaAlO₆)₀.₇ (LSAT) substrate. A fundamental understanding of the local ionic and electronic structure around the dislocation cores is crucial to further engineer the properties of these complex multifunctional heterostructures. Here we combine experimental characterization via analytical scanning transmission electron microscopy with results of molecular dynamics and density functional theory calculations to gain insights into the structure and defect chemistry of these dislocation arrays. Our results show that these dislocations lead to undercoordinated Ta/Al cations at the dislocation core, where oxygen vacancies can easily be formed, further facilitated by the presence of cation vacancies. The reduced Ti³⁺ observed experimentally at the dislocations by electron energy-loss spectroscopy are a consequence of both the structure of the ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 25, 2023
Manuel Cordova,
Pinelopi Moutzouri,
Sten O. Nilsson Lill,
Alexander Cousen,
Martin Kearns,
Stefan T. Norberg,
Anna Svensk Ankarberg,
James McCabe,
Arthur C. Pinon,
Staffan Schantz,
Lyndon Emsley
- Structure determination of amorphous materials remains challenging, owing to the disorder inherent to these materials. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) powder crystallography is a powerful method to determine the structure of molecular solids, but disorder leads to both a high degree of overlap between measured signals, resulting in challenges for spectral assignment, and prevents the unambiguous identification of a single modelled periodic structure as representative of the whole material. Here, we determine the atomic-level ensemble structure of the amorphous form of the drug AZD4625 by combining solid-state NMR experiments with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and machine-learned chemical shifts. By considering the combined shifts of all 1H and 13C atomic sites in the molecule, we determine the structure of the amorphous form by identifying an ensemble of local molecular environments that are in agreement with experiment. We then extract preferred conformations and ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 25, 2023
David W. Tam,
Nicola Colonna,
Neeraj Kumar,
Cinthia Piamonteze,
Fatima Alarab,
Vladimir Strocov,
Antonio Cervellino,
Tom Fennell,
Dariusz Jakub Gawryluk,
Ekaterina Pomjakushina,
Yeong-Ah Soh,
Michele Kenzelmann
- The microscopic mechanism of heavy band formation, relevant for unconventional superconductivity in CeCoIn₅ and other Ce-based heavy fermion materials, depends strongly on the efficiency with which f electrons are delocalized from the rare earth sites and participate in a Kondo lattice. Replacing Ce³⁺ (4f 1, J = 5/2) with Sm³⁺ (4f 5, J = 5/2), we show that a combination of crystal field and on-site Coulomb repulsion causes SmCoIn₅ to exhibit a Γ7 ground state similar to CeCoIn5 with multiple f electrons. Remarkably, we also find that with this ground state, SmCoIn₅ exhibits a temperature-induced valence crossover consistent with a Kondo scenario, leading to increased delocalization of f holes below a temperature scale set by the crystal field, Tv ≈ 60 K. Our result provides evidence that in the case of many f electrons, the crystal field remains the most important tuning knob in controlling the efficiency of delocalization near a heavy fermion quantum critical point, and ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 14, 2023
Manuel Cordova,
Lyndon Emsley
- Structure determination of molecular solids through NMR crystallography relies on the generation of a comprehensive set of candidate crystal structures and on the comparison of chemical shifts computed for those candidates with experimental values. Exploring the polymorph landscape of molecular solids requires extensive computational power, which leads to a significant bottleneck in the generation of the set of candidate crystals by crystal structure prediction (CSP) protocols. Here, we use a database of crystal structures with associated chemical shifts to construct three-dimensional interaction maps in molecular crystals directly derived from a molecular structure and its associated set of experimentally measured chemical shifts. We show how the maps obtained can be used to identify structural constraints for accelerating CSP protocols and to evaluate the likelihood of candidate crystal structures without requiring DFT-level chemical shift computations.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 11, 2023
Pengjie Shi,
Shizhe Feng,
Zhiping Xu
- A high-fidelity neural network-based force field (NN-F³) is developed to cover the space of strain states up to material failure and the non-equilibrium, intermediate nature of fracture. Simulations of fracture in 2D crystals using NN-F³ reveal spatial complexities from lattice-scale kinks to sample-scale patterns. We find that the fracture resistance cannot be captured by the energy densities of relaxed edges as used in the literature. Instead, the fracture patterns, critical stress intensity factors at the kinks, and energy densities of edges in the intermediate, unrelaxed states offer reasonable measures for the fracture toughness and its anisotropy.
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Jul 10, 2023
Alexandre A. Schoepfer,
Ruben Laplaza,
Matthew D. Wodrich,
Jerome Waser,
Clemence Corminboeuf
- Chiral ligands are important components in asymmetric homogeneous catalysis, but their synthesis and screening can be both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Data-driven approaches, in contrast to screening procedures based on intuition, have the potential to reduce the time and resources needed for reaction optimization by more rapidly identifying an ideal catalyst. These approaches, however, are often non-transferable and cannot be applied across different reactions. To overcome this drawback, we introduce a general featurization strategy for bidentate ligands that is coupled with an automated feature selection pipeline and Bayesian ridge regression to perform multivariate linear regression modeling. This approach, which is applicable to any reaction, incorporates electronic, steric, and topological features (rigidity/flexibility, branching, geometry, constitution) and is well-suited for early-stage ligand optimization. Using only a limited number of points per dataset, our ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 07, 2023
Swagata Roy,
Johannes Dürholt,
Thomas Asche,
Federico Zipoli,
Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
- The reactivity of silicates in aqueous solution is relevant to various chemistries ranging from silicate minerals in geology, to the C-S-H phase in cement, nanoporous zeolite catalysts, or highly porous precipitated silica. While simulations of chemical reactions can provide insight at the molecular level, balancing accuracy and scale in reactive simulations in the condensed phase is a challenge. Here, we demonstrate how a machine-learning reactive interatomic potential can accurately capture silicate-water reactivity. The model was trained on a new dataset comprising 400,000 energies and forces of molecular clusters at the 𝜔-B97XD\def2-TVZP level. To ensure the robustness of the model, we introduce a new and general active learning strategy based on the attribution of the model uncertainty, that automatically isolates uncertain regions of bulk simulations to be calculated as small-sized clusters. Our trained potential is found to reproduce static and dynamic properties of liquid ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jul 06, 2023
Sanggyu Chong,
Federico Grasselli,
Chiheb Ben Mahmoud,
Joe Morrow,
Volker Deringer,
Michele Ceriotti
- Machine learning (ML) models for molecules and materials commonly rely on a decomposition of the global target quantity into local, atom-centered contributions. This approach is convenient from a computational perspective, enabling large-scale ML-driven simulations with a linear-scaling cost, and can also be used to deduce useful structure--property relations as they associate simple atomic motifs with complicated macroscopic properties. However, even though there exist practical justifications for these decompositions, only the global quantity is rigorously defined, and thus it is unclear to what extent the atomistic terms predicted by the model can be trusted. Here, we introduce a quantitative metric, which we call the local prediction rigidity (LPR), to assess how robust the locally decomposed predictions of ML models are. We investigate the dependence of LPR on the details of model training, e.g. composition of the dataset, for several different problems ranging from simple ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 30, 2023
Elias Moubarak,
Seyed Mohamad Moosavi,
Charithea Charalambous,
Susana Garcia,
Berend Smit
- In this paper, we present a workflow that is designed to work without manual intervention to efficiently predict, by using molecular simulations, the thermodynamic data that is needed to design a carbon capture process. We developed a procedure that does not rely on fitting of the adsorption isotherms. From molecular simulations, we can obtain accurate data for both, the pure component isotherms as well as the mixture isotherms. This allowed us to make a detailed comparison of the different methods to predict the mixture isotherms. All approaches rely on an accurate description of the pure component isotherms and a model to predict the mixture isotherms. As we are interested in low CO₂ concentrations, it is essential that these models correctly predict the low pressure limit, i.e., give a correct description of the Henry regime. Among the equations that describe this limit correctly, the dual-site Langmuir (DSL) model is often used for the pure components and the extended DSL ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Jun 26, 2023
Philipp Rüßmann,
Masoud Bahari,
Stefan Blügel,
Björn Trauzettel
- Multi-band effects in superconducting heterostructures provide a rich playground for unconventional physics. We combine two complementary approaches based on density-functional theory (DFT) and effective low-energy model theory in order to investigate the proximity effect in a gold overlayer on the s-wave superconductor aluminium. We explain both theoretical approaches and intertwine the effective model and DFT analysis. This allows us to predict finite energy superconducting avoided crossings due to the interplay of the Rashba surface state of Au, and hybridization with the electronic structure of superconducting Al. We investigate the nature of the induced superconducting pairing and analyze their mixed singlet-triplet character. Our findings demonstrate the general recipes to explore material systems that exhibit novel finite-energy pairings.
This dataset accompanies a publication where the data is presented and discussed in detail.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 26, 2023
Philipp Rüßmann,
Xian-Kui Wei,
Abdur Rehman Jalil,
Yoichi Ando,
Detlev Grützmacher,
Stefan Blügel,
Joachim Mayer
- Materials that can host Majorana zero modes gained a lot of attention in recent years due to the possibility to engineer topologically protected quantum computing platforms. Promising candidates are heterostructures of topological insulators and superconductors. Here we present density-functional-theory-based calculations for Pd-doped Bi₂Te₃ and Pd(Bi,Te)x (x=1,2) in order to shed light on the superconducting properties in the self-formed superconducting phase when Pd is deposited on top of the topological insulator Bi₂Te₃.
This dataset accompanies a joint experiment/theory publication and publishes the related density functional theory calculations for:
- relaxed geometries for Pd intercalation in the Bi₂Te₃ vdW gap
- electronic structure of PdTe and PdTe₂ compared to alloy phases of Pd(Bi,Te) and Pd(Bi,Te)₂, collectively referred to as "xPBT"
- calculations for the superconducting state of xPBT phases within the Kohn-Sham Bogoliubov-de Gennes method
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Jun 22, 2023
Azim Fitri Ainul Abidin,
Ikutaro Hamada
- We present a density functional theory study of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) on a single atom catalyst embedded in graphene, namely, TM-N₄-C (TM = Fe and Co), using the effective screening medium method combined with the reference interaction site model (ESM-RISM). It was found that Fe-N₄-C and Co-N₄-C show comparable ORR activities from the constant electrode potential simulations, in contrast to the results obtained using the constant (neutral) charge simulation, in which the superior performance of Co-N₄-C has been predicted. The constant potential method allows the variable charge and thus, resulting in a potential dependence of the reaction free energies different from that with the constant charge method in which the potential dependence is included as an ad hoc manner. We suggest the importance of the variable charge in the simulation of the electrochemical reaction, which is enabled by ESM-RISM.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 22, 2023
Tommaso Gorni,
Oscar Baseggio,
Pietro Delugas,
Iurii Timrov,
Stefano Baroni
- The nature of the gap observed at the zone border in the spin excitation spectrum of CrI₃ quasi-two-dimensional single crystals is still controversial. We perform first-principles calculations based on time-dependent density functional perturbation theory, which indicate that the observed gap results from a combination of spin-orbit and interlayer interaction effects. The former give rise to the anisotropic spin-spin interactions that are responsible for its very existence, while the latter determine both its displacement from the K point of the Brillouin zone, due to the in-plane lattice distortions induced by them, and an enhancement of its magnitude, in agreement with experiments and previous theoretical work based on a lattice model.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 22, 2023
Pietro Delugas,
Oscar Baseggio,
Iurii Timrov,
Stefano Baroni,
Tommaso Gorni
- Recent neutron-diffraction experiments in honeycomb CrI₃ quasi-2D ferromagnets have evinced the existence of a gap at the Dirac point in their spin-wave spectra. The existence of this gap has been attributed to strong in-plane Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya or Kitaev (DM/K) interactions and suggested to set the stage for topologically protected edge states to sustain non-dissipative spin transport. We perform state-of-the-art simulations of the spin-wave spectra in monolayer CrI₃, based on time-dependent density-functional perturbation theory (TDDFpT) and fully accounting for spin-orbit couplings (SOC) from which DM/K interactions ultimately stem. While our results are in qualitative agreement with experiments, the computed TDDFpT magnon gap at the Dirac point is found to be 0.47 meV, roughly six times smaller than the most recent experimental estimates, so questioning that intralayer anisotropies alone can explain the observed gap. Lattice-dynamical calculations, performed within ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 22, 2023
Agustin Salcedo,
Deniz Zengel,
Florian Maurer,
Maria Casapu,
Jan-Dierk Grunwaldt,
Carine Michel,
David Loffreda
- The anharmonic infrared spectrum of adsorbed CO is simulated using density functional theory (DFT) to gain insight into the nature of Pd nanoparticles (NPs) supported on ceria. The authors systematically determine how the simulated infrared spectra are affected by CO coverage, NP size (0.5–1.5 nm), NP morphology (octahedral, icosahedral), and metal-support contact angle, by exploring a diversity of realistic models inspired by ab initio molecular dynamics.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 16, 2023
Angelo Bongiorno,
Feliciano Giustino,
Alfredo Pasquarello
- The record contains model structures of the Si(100)-SiO₂ interface with disordered and crystalline oxides. The models have been purposely designed in order to match a large variety of atomic-scale experimental data. In particular, the models with a disordered oxide reproduce the amorphous nature of the oxide and the density of the oxide near the substrate. The atomic structure does not show any coordination defects consistent with the low measured density of interfacial defect states. The transition region includes intermediate oxidation states of Si in accord with photoemission experiments. Also the dielectric properties agree with the experimental characterization. Hence, the present models synthesize the present status of our experimental knowledge on the Si(100)–SiO₂ interface and provide a solid and necessary basis for future investigations in the area of gate stacks for Si-based microelectronics.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 09, 2023
Luong Thi Ta,
Yoshitada Morikawa,
Ikutaro Hamada
- We study the electronic and optical properties of the hydrogen boride sheet by using the many-body perturbation theory with the perturbative GW (G₀W₀) approximation. It was found that the hydrogen boride sheet shows a semimetallic electronic structure, supporting the previous theoretical study based on the semilocal density functional theory calculations. It was also found that the optical spectrum calculated based on the quasiparticle energies agrees well with the experiments. This work suggests that G₀W₀ approximation may be useful for predicting precise electronic and optical properties of the hydrogen boride sheet and its derivatives.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 09, 2023
Domen Vaupotič,
Angelo Rosa,
Luca Tubiana,
Anže Božič
- Formation of base pairs between the nucleotides of a ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequence gives rise to a complex and often highly branched RNA structure. While numerous studies have demonstrated the functional importance of the high degree of RNA branching—for instance, for its spatial compactness or interaction with other biological macromolecules—RNA branching topology remains largely unexplored. Here, we use the theory of randomly branching polymers to explore the scaling properties of RNAs by mapping their secondary structures onto planar tree graphs. Focusing on random RNA sequences of varying lengths, we determine the two scaling exponents related to their topology of branching. Our results indicate that ensembles of RNA secondary structures are characterized by annealed random branching and scale similarly to self-avoiding trees in three dimensions. We further show that the obtained scaling exponents are robust upon changes in nucleotide composition, tree topology, and folding ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 08, 2023
Youssef Ait Oubella,
Yassine Chaibi,
Leila Nouri,
Fatima Ezzahra Ihfa,
Rachid Nassif,
Mohamed Bennai
- Multi-junction solar cells pose a particular modeling challenge, and advanced methods are needed to improve their efficiency and reduce their cost. We present here data about the I-V and P-V characteristics gotten using the electrical parameters obtained through an easy method to extract the electrical parameters of multi-junction solar cells using a single-diode model. The proposed technique is based solely on manufacturer data, and we solve the necessary mathematical equations numerically.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 08, 2023
Rui Zeng,
Lei Zhu,
Ming Zhang,
Wenkai Zhong,
Guanqing Zhou,
Jiaxing Zhuang,
Tianyu Hao,
Zichun Zhou,
Libo Zhou,
Nicolai Hartmann,
Xiaonan Xue,
Hao Jing,
Fei Han,
Yiming Bai,
Hongbo Wu,
Zheng Tang,
Yecheng Zou,
Haiming Zhu,
Chun-chao Chen,
Yongming Zhang,
Feng Liu
- Distributed photovoltaics in living environment harvest the sunlight in different incident angles throughout the day. The development of planer solar cells with large light-receiving angle can reduce the requirements in installation form factor and is therefore urgently required. Here, thin film organic photovoltaics with nano-sized phase separation integrated in micro-sized surface topology is demonstrated as an ideal solution to proposed applications. All-polymer solar cells, by means of a newly developed sequential processing, show large magnitude hierarchical morphology with facilitated exciton-to-carrier conversion. The nano fibrilar donor-acceptor network and micron-scale optical field trapping structure in combination contributes to an efficiency of 19.06% (certified 18.59%), which is the highest value to date for all-polymer solar cells. Furthermore, the micron-sized surface topology also contributes to a large light-receiving angle. A 30% improvement of power gain is ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 07, 2023
Charalambos Louca,
Armando Genco,
Salvatore Chiavazzo,
Thomas P. Lyons,
Sam Randerson,
Chiara Trovatello,
Peter Claronino,
Rahul Jayaprakash,
Xuerong Hu,
James Howarth,
Kenji Watanabe,
Takashi Taniguchi,
Stefano Dal Conte,
Roman Gorbachev,
David G. Lidzey,
Giulio Cerullo,
Oleksandr Kyriienko,
Alexander I. Tartakovskii
- Nonlinear interactions between excitons strongly coupled to light are key for accessing quantum many-body phenomena in polariton systems. Atomically-thin two-dimensional semiconductors provide an attractive platform for strong light-matter coupling owing to many controllable excitonic degrees of freedom. Among these, the recently emerged exciton hybridization opens access to unexplored excitonic species, with a promise of enhanced interactions. Here, we employ hybridized interlayer excitons (hIX) in bilayer MoS₂ to achieve highly nonlinear excitonic and polaritonic effects. Such interlayer excitons possess an out-of-plane electric dipole as well as an unusually large oscillator strength allowing observation of dipolar polaritons (dipolaritons) in bilayers in optical microcavities. Compared to excitons and polaritons in MoS₂ monolayers, both hIX and dipolaritons exhibit approximately 8 times higher nonlinearity, which is further strongly enhanced when hIX and intralayer excitons, ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 02, 2023
Jing Yang,
Stefano Falletta,
Alfredo Pasquarello
- In this work, we systematically evaluate the accuracy in band gap prediction of range-separated hybrid functionals on a large set of semiconducting and insulating materials and carry out comparisons with the performance of their global counterparts. We observe that all the range-separated hybrid functionals that correctly describe the long-range dielectric screening significantly improve from standard hybrid functionals such as PBE0 and HSE06. Among this group, the choice of the short-range Fock exchange fraction and the screening length can further reduce the predicted error. We then propose a universal expression for the selection of the inverse screening parameter as a function of the short-range and long-range Fock exchange fractions, which results in a mean absolute error as small as 0.15 eV for band gap prediction.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 02, 2023
Junfeng Qiao,
Giovanni Pizzi,
Nicola Marzari
- Maximally localized Wannier functions (MLWFs) are widely used to construct first-principles tight-binding models that accurately reproduce the electronic structure of materials. Recently, robust and automated approaches to generate these MLWFs have emerged, leading to natural sets of atomic-like orbitals that describe both the occupied states and the lowest lying unoccupied ones (when the latter can be meaningfully described by bonding/anti-bonding combinations of localized orbitals). For many applications, it is important to instead have MLWFs that describe only certain target manifolds separated in energy between them — the occupied states, the empty states, or certain groups of bands. Here, we start from the full set of MLWFs describing simultaneously all the target manifolds, and then mix them using a combination of parallel transport and maximal localization to construct orthogonal sets of MLWFs that fully and only span the desired target submanifolds. The algorithm is simple ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Jun 01, 2023
Fabian Belleflamme,
Juerg Hutter
- We study self-interaction effects in solvated and strongly-correlated cationic molecular clusters, with a focus on the solvated hydroxyl radical. To address the self-interaction issue, we apply the DC-r²SCAN method, with the auxiliary density matrix approach. Validating our method through simulations of bulk liquid water, we demonstrate that DC-r²SCAN maintains the structural accuracy of r²SCAN while effectively addressing spin density localization issues. Extending our analysis to solvated cationic molecular clusters, we find that the hemibonded motif in the [CH₃S∴CH₃SH]⁺ cluster is disrupted in the DC-r²SCAN simulation, in contrast to r²SCAN that preserves the (three-electron-two-center)-bonded motif. Similarly, for the [SH∴SH₂]⁺ cluster, r²SCAN restores the hemibonded motif through spin leakage, while DC-r²SCAN predicts a weaker hemibond formation influenced by solvent-solute interactions. Our findings demonstrate the potential of DC-r²SCAN combined with the auxiliary density ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 31, 2023
Xiangyu Chen,
William Shao,
Nam Le,
Paulette Clancy
- Atomic-scale simulations of reactive processes have been stymied by two factors: the lack of a suitable semi-empirical force field on the one hand, and the impractically large computational burden of using ab initio molecular dynamics on the other. In this paper, we use an "on-the-fly" active learning technique to develop a non-parameterized force field that, in essence, exhibits the accuracy of density functional theory and the speed of a classical molecular dynamics simulation. We developed a force field capable of capturing the crystallization of gallium nitride (GaN) during a novel additive manufacturing process featuring the reaction of liquid Ga and gaseous nitrogen precursors to grow crystalline GaN thin films. We show that this machine learning model is capable of producing a single force field that can model solid, liquid and gas phases involved in the process. We verified our computational predictions against a range of experimental measurements relevant to each phase ...
Latest version: v4
Publication date: May 31, 2023
Kunihiko Yamauchi,
Ikutaro Hamada
- The effect of hydrogen doping on the crystal structure and the electronic state in SmNiO₃ is investigated by means of density-functional theory with a combinatorial structure-generation approach. While 100% of hydrogen doping per Ni atom has been supposed to be responsible for the experimentally observed insulating phase, we found that 50% of hydrogen doping results in an outstandingly stable atomic structure showing the insulating property. The stable crystal structure shows the peculiar layered pattern of charge disproportionation of Ni²⁺ and Ni³⁺ valences together with the strong Jahn-Teller distortion that causes the eg orbital state splitting and opens the band gap.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 30, 2023
Pietro Bonfà,
Ifeanyi John Onuorah,
Franz Lang,
Iurii Timrov,
Lorenzo Monacelli,
Chennan Wang,
Xiao Sun,
Oleg Petracic,
Giovanni Pizzi,
Nicola Marzari,
Stephen John Blundell,
Roberto De Renzi
- Magnetostriction drives a rhombohedral distortion in the cubic rock salt antiferromagnet MnO at the Nèel temperature TN=118 K. As an unexpected consequence we show that this distortion acts to localize the site of an implanted muon due to the accompanying redistribution of electron density. This lifts the degeneracy between equivalent sites, resulting in a single observed muon precession frequency. Above TN, the muon instead becomes delocalized around a network of equivalent sites. Our first-principles simulations based on Hubbard-corrected density-functional theory and molecular dynamics are consistent with our experimental data and help to resolve a long-standing puzzle regarding muon data on MnO, as well as having wider applicability to other magnetic oxides.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 30, 2023
Emanuele Bosoni,
Louis Beal,
Marnik Bercx,
Peter Blaha,
Stefan Blügel,
Jens Bröder,
Martin Callsen,
Stefaan Cottenier,
Augustin Degomme,
Vladimir Dikan,
Kristjan Eimre,
Espen Flage-Larsen,
Marco Fornari,
Alberto Garcia,
Luigi Genovese,
Matteo Giantomassi,
Sebastiaan P. Huber,
Henning Janssen,
Georg Kastlunger,
Matthias Krack,
Georg Kresse,
Thomas D. Kühne,
Kurt Lejaeghere,
Georg K. H. Madsen,
Martijn Marsman,
Nicola Marzari,
Gregor Michalicek,
Hossein Mirhosseini,
Tiziano M. A. Müller,
Guido Petretto,
Chris J. Pickard,
Samuel Poncé,
Gian-Marco Rignanese,
Oleg Rubel,
Thomas Ruh,
Michael Sluydts,
Danny E. P. Vanpoucke,
Sudarshan Vijay,
Michael Wolloch,
Daniel Wortmann,
Aliaksandr V. Yakutovich,
Jusong Yu,
Austin Zadoks,
Bonan Zhu,
Giovanni Pizzi
- In the past decades many density-functional theory methods and codes adopting periodic boundary conditions have been developed and are now extensively used in condensed matter physics and materials science research. Only in 2016, however, their precision (i.e., to which extent properties computed with different codes agree among each other) was systematically assessed on elemental crystals: a first crucial step to evaluate the reliability of such computations. We discuss here general recommendations for verification studies aiming at further testing precision and transferability of density-functional-theory computational approaches and codes. We illustrate such recommendations using a greatly expanded protocol covering the whole periodic table from Z=1 to 96 and characterizing 10 prototypical cubic compounds for each element: 4 unaries and 6 oxides, spanning a wide range of coordination numbers and oxidation states. The primary outcome is a reference dataset of 960 equations of ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 26, 2023
Benjamin H. Sjølin,
Peter B. Jørgensen,
Andrea Fedrigucci,
Tejs Vegge,
Arghya Bhowmik,
Ivano E. Castelli
- We developed and implemented a multi-target multi-fidelity workflow to explore the chemical space of antiperovskite materials with general formula X3BA (X = Li, Na, Mg) and PM-3m space group, searching for stable high-performance solid state electrolytes for all-solid state batteries. The workflow is based on the calculation of thermodynamic and kinetic properties, which include phase and electrochemical stability, semiconducting behaviour, and ionic diffusivity. To accelerate the calculation of the kinetic properties, we use a surrogate model able to predict the transition state structure during ionic diffusion. This reduces the calculation cost by more than one order of magnitude while keeping the mean error within 73 meV compared to the more accurate nudged elastic band method. This method allows us identify 14 materials that agree with the experimentally reported results as some of the best solid state electrolytes. Moreover, this approach is general and chemistry neutral, so ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 23, 2023
Casey E. Beall,
Emiliana Fabbri,
Adam H. Clark,
Nur Sena Yüzbasi,
Thomas Graule,
Thomas J. Schmidt
- Carbon is often used as a conductive additive in catalyst layers to increase conductivity and catalytic activity. However, the effect of carbon addition to perovskites on the oxygen reduction (ORR) and oxygen evolution (OER) reactions is convoluted. In this work, composites of perovskite Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3-δ (BSCF) and conductive additives, carbon and indium doped tin oxide are compared. It is found that the conductive additives have differing effects on the ORR and OER activities and cobalt redox behavior, with carbon having a much more significant effect. In order to elucidate further these differences between BSCF and BSCF/Carbon, operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is measured simultaneously with cyclic voltammetry into the ORR and OER regions and the continuous changes in the Co oxidation state are observed with high time resolution. We theorize that carbon is enhancing the Co redox activity and as a result, the ORR and OER activities are likewise improved.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 23, 2023
Tsz Wai Ko,
Jonas A. Finkler,
Stefan Goedecker,
Jörg Behler
- In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of machine learning potentials (MLPs) for atomistic simulations with applications in many fields from chemistry to materials science. While most current MLPs are based on environment-dependent atomic energies, the limitations of this locality approximation can be overcome, e.g., in fourth-generation MLPs, which incorporate long-range electrostatic interactions based on an equilibrated global charge distribution. Apart from the considered interactions, the quality of MLPs crucially depends on the information available about the system, i.e., the descriptors.
In this work we show that including — in addition to structural information — the electrostatic potential arising from the charge distribution in the atomic environments significantly improves the quality and transferability of the potentials. Moreover, the extended descriptor allows to overcome current limitations of two- and three-body based feature ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 23, 2023
Michele Simoncelli,
Francesco Mauri,
Nicola Marzari
- Predicting the thermal conductivity of glasses from first principles has hitherto been a very complex problem. The established Allen-Feldman and Green-Kubo approaches employ approximations with limited validity--the former neglects anharmonicity, the latter misses the quantum Bose-Einstein statistics of vibrations--and require atomistic models that are very challenging for first principles methods. Here, we present a protocol to determine from first-principles the thermal conductivity k(T) of glasses above the plateau (i.e., above the temperature-independent region appearing almost without exceptions in the k(T) of all glasses at cryogenic temperatures). The protocol combines the Wigner formulation of thermal transport with convergence-acceleration techniques, and accounts comprehensively for the effects of structural disorder, anharmonicity, and Bose-Einstein statistics. We validate this approach in vitreous silica, showing that models containing less than 200 atoms can already ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: May 22, 2023
Sergey Pozdnyakov,
Michele Ceriotti
- Graph neural networks are a popular deep-learning architecture in applications to materials and molecules, and the most widespread implementations rely on interatomic distances as geometric descriptors. Unfortunately, GNNs based on distances are not complete, i.e. there are geometries, corresponding to molecules and/or periodic structures, that are indistinguishable by the GNN. For these, the corresponding machine-learning models will be unable to learn differences in the properties of the "degenerate" structures. This dataset contains a collection of molecular and solid structures that cannot be discriminated by distance-based graph neural networks, together with example code showing how to parse them and use to demonstrate the shortcomings of this class of machine-learning algorithms.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 12, 2023
Fatima Ezzahra Ihfa,
Leila Nouri,
Youssef Ait Oubella,
Youness Ben Said,
Zoubida Sakhi,
Awatif Dezairi,
Mohamed Bennai
- This data presents the characteristics obtained using extracted parameters of multi- junction solar cells using a single diode triple-junction model. The proposed method combines analytical and numerical techniques to solve a nonlinear equation and determine the parameters, including the ideality factor, series resistance, shunt resistance, photocurrent, and saturation current, using manufacturer data and mathematical equations. The results show that the suggested approach achieves satisfactory performance and provide an accurate representation of the multi-junction circuit’s parameters. Overall, this study provides a valuable contribution to the field of solar cell parameter extraction and offers insights for further research in this area.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 11, 2023
Aik Rui Tan,
Shingo Urata,
Samuel Goldman,
Johannes C. B. Dietschreit,
Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
- Neural networks (NNs) often assign high confidence to their predictions, even for points far out-of-distribution, making uncertainty quantification (UQ) a challenge. When they are employed to model interatomic potentials in materials systems, this problem leads to unphysical structures that disrupt simulations, or to biased statistics and dynamics that do not reflect the true physics. Differentiable UQ techniques can find new informative data and drive active learning loops for robust potentials. However, a variety of UQ techniques, including newly developed ones, exist for atomistic simulations and there are no clear guidelines for which are most effective or suitable for a given case. In this work, we examine multiple UQ schemes for improving the robustness of NN interatomic potentials (NNIPs) through active learning. In particular, we compare incumbent ensemble-based methods against strategies that use single, deterministic NNs: mean-variance estimation, deep evidential ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: May 04, 2023
Xiao Zhou,
Ali Tehranchi,
W.A. Curtin
- The urgent need for clean energy coupled with the exceptional promise of hydrogen (H) as a clean fuel is driving development of new metals resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. Experiments on new fcc high entropy alloys present a paradox: these alloys absorb more H than Ni or SS304 (austenitic 304 stainless steel) while being more resistant to embrittlement. Here, a new theory of embrittlement in fcc metals is presented based on the role of H in driving an intrinsic ductile-to-brittle transition at a crack tip. The theory quantitatively predicts the H concentration at which a transition to embrittlement occurs in good agreement with experiments for SS304, SS316L, CoCrNi, CoNiV, CoCrFeNi, and CoCrFeMnNi. The theory rationalizes why CoNiV is the alloy most resistant to embrittlement and why SS316L is more resistant than the high entropy alloys CoCrFeNi and CoCrFeMnNi, which opens a path for the computationally guided discovery of new embrittlement-resistant alloys.
Latest version: v2
Publication date: May 04, 2023
Jonathan Schmidt,
Hai-Chen Wang,
Tiago F. T. Cerqueira,
Silvana Botti,
Miguel A. L. Marques
- In the past decade we have witnessed the appearance of large databases of calculated material properties. These are most often obtained with the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) functional of density-functional theory, a well established and reliable technique that is by now the standard in materials science. However, there have been recent theoretical developments that allow for an increased accuracy in the calculations. Here, we present the updated alexandria dataset of calculations for more than 415k solid-state materials obtained with two improved functionals: PBE for solids (that yields consistently better geometries than the PBE) and SCAN (probably the best all-around functional at the moment). Our results provide an accurate overview of the landscape of stable (and nearly stable) materials, and as such can be used for more reliable predictions of novel compounds. They can also be used for training machine learning models, or even for the comparison and benchmark of PBE, PBE for solids, and SCAN.
Latest version: v3
Publication date: May 01, 2023
Stefano Falletta,
Alfredo Pasquarello
- We use piecewise-linear functionals to study the polaron energy landscape and hopping rates in 𝜷-Ga₂O₃, which we adopt as an example of an anisotropic material hosting multiple polaronic states. We illustrate various functionals for polaron localization, including a hybrid functional and two types of semilocal functionals, and discuss how to ensure the piecewise linearity condition. Then, we determine the formation energies of stable polarons, and show that single-site and multi-site polaronic states can be found in close energetic competition. We calculate the hyperfine and superhyperfine parameters associated with each polaron, and discuss the comparison with experiment. Next, we perform nudged-elastic-band calculations to determine energy landscapes and hole transfer rates of all first-nearest-neighbor polaron hoppings. We show that when the piecewise linearity condition is ensured polaron properties are robust upon variation of the functional adopted, including formation ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 28, 2023
Chiara Ricca,
Tristan Blandenier,
Valérie Werner,
Xing Wang,
Simone Pokrant,
Ulrich Aschauer
- Perovskite oxynitrides are, due to their reduced band gap compared to oxides, promising materials for photocatalytic applications. They are most commonly synthesized from {110} layered Carpy-Galy (A₂B₂O₇) perovskites via thermal ammonolysis, i.e. the exposure to a flow of ammonia at elevated temperature. The conversion of the layered oxide to the non-layered oxynitride must involve a complex combination of nitrogen incorporation, oxygen removal and ultimately structural transition by elimination of the interlayer shear plane. Despite the process being commonly used, little is known about the microscopic mechanisms and hence factors that could ease the conversion. Here we aim to derive such insights via density functional theory calculations of the defect chemistry of the oxide and the oxynitride as well as the oxide's surface chemistry. Our results point to the crucial role of surface oxygen vacancies in forming clusters of NH₃ decomposition products and in incorporating N, most ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 25, 2023
Luca Binci,
Nicola Marzari
- The magnetic, noncollinear parametrization of Dudarev's DFT+U method is generalized to fully-relativistic ultrasoft pseudopotentials. We present the definition of the DFT+U total energy functional, and the calculation of forces and stresses in the case of orthogonalized atomic orbitals defining the localised Hubbard manifold, where additional contributions arising from the derivative of the inverse square root of the overlap matrix appear. We further extend the perturbative calculation of the Hubbard U parameters within density-functional perturbation theory to the noncollinear relativistic case, by exploiting an existing and recently developed theoretical approach that takes advantage of the time-reversal operator to solve a second Sternheimer equation. We validate and apply the new scheme by studying the electronic structure and the thermodynamics of the binary compounds EuX (where X = O, S, Se, Te is a chalcogen atom), as representative simple crystals, and of the pyrochlore ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 19, 2023
Shubhajit Das,
Ruben Laplaza,
J. Terence Blaskovits,
Clemence Corminboeuf
- Frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs), featuring reactive combinations of Lewis acids and Lewis bases, have been utilized for myriad metal-free homogeneous catalytic processes. Immobilizing the active Lewis sites to a solid support, especially to porous scaffolds, has shown great potential to ameliorate FLP catalysis by circumventing some of its inherent drawbacks, such as product separation and catalyst recyclability. Nevertheless, designing immobilized Lewis pair active sites (LPASs) is challenging due to the requirement of placing the donor and acceptor centers in appropriate geometric arrangements while maintaining the necessary chemical environment to perform catalysis, and clear design rules have not yet been established. In this work, we formulate simple guidelines to build highly active LPASs for direct catalytic hydrogenation of CO₂ through a large-scale screening of a diverse library of 25,000 immobilized FLPs.
The library is built by introducing boron-containing acidic sites ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 18, 2023
Gianluca Prandini,
Antimo Marrazzo,
Ivano E. Castelli,
Nicolas Mounet,
Elsa Passaro,
Jusong Yu,
Nicola Marzari
- Despite the enormous success and popularity of density functional theory, systematic verification and validation studies are still very limited both in number and scope. Here, we propose a universal standard protocol to verify publicly available pseudopotential libraries, based on several independent criteria including verification against all-electron equations of state and plane-wave convergence tests for phonon frequencies, band structure, cohesive energy and pressure. Adopting these criteria we obtain two optimal pseudopotential sets, namely the Standard Solid State Pseudopotential (SSSP) efficiency and precision libraries, tailored for high-throughput materials screening and high-precision materials modelling. As of today, the SSSP precision library is the most accurate open-source pseudopotential library available. This archive entry contains the database of calculations (phonons, cohesive energy, equation of state, band structure, pressure, etc.) together with the ...
Latest version: v11
Publication date: Apr 13, 2023
Philip Yox,
Frank Cerasoli,
Arka Sarkar,
Victoria Kyveryga,
Gayatri Viswanathan,
Davide Donaido,
Kirill Kovnir
- The zinc–antimony phase space has been heavily investigated due to the structural complexity and abundance of high-performing thermoelectric materials. Consequentially, the desire to use zinc and antimony as framework elements to encage rattling cations and achieve phonon-glass-electron-crystal-type properties has remained an enticing goal with only two alkali metal clathrates to date, Cs₈Zn₁₈Sb₂₈ and K₅₈Zn₁₂₂Sb₂₀₇. Guided by Zintl electron-counting predictions, we explored the Ba–Zn–Pn (Pn = As, Sb) phase space proximal to the expected composition of the type-I clathrate. In situ powder X-ray diffraction studies revealed two “hidden” compounds which can only be synthesized in a narrow temperature range. The ex situ synthesis and crystal growth unveiled that instead of type-I clathrates, compositionally close but structurally different new clathrate-like compounds formed, Ba₂Zn₅As₆ and Ba₂Zn₅Sb₆. These materials crystallize in a unique structure, in the orthorhombic space group ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 12, 2023
Mahesh Ramakrishnan,
Yves Joly,
Quintin Meier,
Michael Fechner,
Frank Lichtenberg,
Michael Porer,
Sergii Parchenko,
Elisabeth Bothschafter,
Yoav William Windsor,
Urs Staub
- We present our resonant X-ray diffraction work to study the antiferromagnetic spin canting perpendicular to the hexagonal planes of the archetypal type-I multiferroic YMnO₃. We find the x-ray diffraction spectral shape at the Mn L2,3 edges change as a function of temperature below TN for this material. Using a combination of phenomenological arguments and computations using the DFT-based FDMNES code, we attribute the difference spectra to be a result of interference of scattered amplitudes from the canted magnetic dipole and higher-order magnetoelectric multipoles.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 12, 2023
Pablo G. Lustemberg,
Chengwu Yang,
Yuemin Wang,
Christof Wöll,
M. Veronica Ganduglia-Pirovano
- The facet-dependent adsorption of CO on oxidized and reduced CeO₂ single crystal surfaces is reviewed, with emphasis on the effect of CO coverage and the ability of state-of-the-art quantum-mechanical methods to provide reliable energies and an accurate description of the IR vibrational frequency of CO. Comparison with detailed, high-resolution experimental IRRAS data performed on single crystal samples allows the assignment of the different CO vibrational bands observed on all three low-index ceria surfaces. Good agreement is achieved with the hybrid DFT approach with the HSE06 functional and with saturation coverage. It is shown that CO is very sensitive to the structure of cerium oxide surfaces and to the presence of oxygen vacancies. The combined theoretical-experimental approach offers new opportunities for a better characterization of ceria nanoparticles and for unraveling changes occurring during reactions involving CO at higher pressures.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 12, 2023
Zhenfa Zheng,
Yongliang Shi,
Jin-Jian Zhou,
Oleg V. Prezhdo,
Qijing Zheng,
Jin Zhao
- Application of the nonadiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) approach is severely limited to studying carrier dynamics in the momentum space, since a supercell is required to sample the phonon excitation and electron-phonon (e-ph) interaction at different momenta in a molecular dynamics simulation. Here, we develop an ab initio approach for the real-time quantum dynamics for charge carriers in the momentum space (NAMD_k) by directly introducing the e-ph coupling into the Hamiltonian based on the harmonic approximation. The NAMD_k approach maintains the quantum zero-point energy and proper phonon dispersion, and includes memory effects of phonon excitation. The application of NAMD_k to the hot carrier dynamics in graphene reveals the phonon-specific relaxation mechanism. An energy threshold of 0.2eV, defined by two optical phonon modes strongly coupled to the electrons, separates the hot electron relaxation into fast and slow regions with the lifetimes of pico- and nano-seconds, ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Apr 12, 2023
Haoyue Guo,
Matthew R. Carbone,
Chuntian Cao,
Jianzhou Qu,
Feng Wang,
Shinjae Yoo,
Nongnuch Artrith,
Alexander Urban,
Deyu Lu
- We present a sulfur K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) database of 18 crystalline and 48 amorphous Lithium-Phosphorous-Sulfur (LPS) compounds. The database contains a total of 2681 XANES spectra of symmetrically inequivalent absorbing S sites. Structures were taken from Materials Cloud entry 2022.17 (archive.materialscloud.org/record/2022.17) and were originally generated by systematically removing Li, P and S atoms from known crystal structures using an evolutionary algorithm and an artificial neural network based interatomic potential. The details of this procedure can be found in Guo et al. (see references below). From this data set, low-energy structures were selected for spectral simulations. The excited electron and core hole method as implemented in VASP 6.2.1 was used to compute the XANES spectra for each symmetrically inequivalent Sulfur atom. The details of the VASP simulations can be found in the associated manuscript.
Acknowledgements: We acknowledge ...
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Apr 12, 2023
Samuel Poncé,
Miquel Royo,
Massimiliano Stengel,
Nicola Marzari,
Marco Gibertini
- Charge transport plays a crucial role in manifold potential applications of two-dimensional materials, including field effect transistors, solar cells, and transparent conductors. At most operating temperatures, charge transport is hindered by scattering of carriers by lattice vibrations. Assessing the intrinsic phonon-limited carrier mobility is thus of paramount importance to identify promising candidates for next-generation devices. Here we provide a framework to efficiently compute the drift and Hall carrier mobility of two-dimensional materials through the Boltzmann transport equation by relying on a Fourier-Wannier interpolation. Building on a recent formulation of long-range contributions to dynamical matrices and phonon dispersions [Phys. Rev. X 11, 041027 (2021)], we extend the approach to electron-phonon coupling including the effect of dynamical dipoles and quadrupoles. We identify an unprecedented contribution associated with the Berry connection that is crucial to ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 05, 2023
Nataliya Lopanitsyna,
Guillaume Fraux,
Maximilian A. Springer,
Sandip De,
Michele Ceriotti
- Alloys composed of several elements in roughly equimolar composition, often referred to as high-entropy alloys, have long been of interest for their thermodynamics and peculiar mechanical properties, and more recently for their potential application in catalysis. They are a considerable challenge to traditional atomistic modeling, and also to data-driven potentials that for the most part have memory footprint, computational effort and data requirements which scale poorly with the number of elements included. We apply a recently proposed scheme to compress chemical information in a lower-dimensional space, which reduces dramatically the cost of the model with negligible loss of accuracy, to build a potential that can describe 25 d-block transition metals. The model shows semi-quantitative accuracy for prototypical alloys and is remarkably stable when extrapolating to structures outside its training set.
In this record, we provide a dataset containing 25,000 structures utilized for ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 05, 2023
Miki Bonacci,
Nicola Spallanzani,
Elisa Molinari,
Daniele Varsano,
Andrea Ferretti
- In this work we provide the results for IP and EA of all the 100 molecules of the set as computed within the Yambo code. In this way, we enlarge the GW100 benchmark considering the largely used Godby-Need Plasmon Pole Approximation (GNPPA), used in Yambo to describe the frequency dependence of the screening potential and not yet included in previous GW100 studies. Fully converged results on HOMO and LUMO are provided here for each molecule of the GW100 set, as extrapolated from Yambo calculations with different value of the involved parameters (plane wave cutoff for the microscopic dielectric matrix and empty state summations).
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Apr 03, 2023
Alessia Fortunati,
Francesca Risplendi,
Michele Re Fiorentin,
Giancarlo Cicero,
Emmanuele Parisi,
Micaela Castellino,
Elena Simone,
Boyan Iliev,
Thomas Schubert,
Nunzio Russo,
Simelys Hernández
- Seven imidazolium-based ionic liquids (ILs) with different anions and cations were investigated as catholytes for the CO₂ electrocatalytic reduction to CO over silver. A significant activity and stability, but different selectivities for CO₂ reduction or the side H₂ evolution were observed. Density functional theory results show that the role of the IL anions is to tune the ratio between the CO₂ captured and electrochemically converted. Acetate anions (being strong Lewis bases) are more prone to CO₂ capture, enhancing H₂ evolution, while fluorinated anions (being weaker Lewis bases) favour the CO₂ electroreduction. Differently from the hydrolytically unstable 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate, 1-Butyl-3-Methylimidazolium Triflate was the most promising IL showing the highest Faradaic efficiency to CO (>95%), up to 8h of stable operation at high current rates (-20mA & -60 mA).
These results open the way for a strategic selection of the most suitable IL for the CO₂ electroreduction and its future process scale-up.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 31, 2023
Igor Reshetnyak,
Arnaud Lorin,
Alfredo Pasquarello
- The screening arising from many-body excitations is a crucial quantity for describing ab-sorption and inelastic X-ray scattering (IXS) of materials. Similarly, the electron screening plays a critical role in state-of-the-art approaches for determining the fundamental band gap. However, ab initio studies of the screening in liquid water have remained limited. Here, we use a combined analysis based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation and time-dependent density functional theory. We first show that absorption spectra at near-edge energies are insufficient to assess the accuracy by which the screening is described. Next, when the energy range under scrutiny is extended, we instead find that the IXS spectra are highly sensitive and allow for the selection of the optimal theoretical scheme. This leads to good agreement with experiment over a large range of transferred energies and momenta, and enables establishing the elusive fundamental band gap of liquid water at 9.3 eV.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 29, 2023
Alberto Carta,
Claude Ederer
- We present a potential explanation for the strain-induced metal-insulator transition that has recently been observed in thin films of SrCrO₃ using density-functional theory (DFT) and its extension to DFT+U. Our calculations show that the unstrained system exhibits a C-type antiferromagnetically ordered ground state, which is near to a Jahn-Teller instability, given realistic values of the Hubbard U parameter. However, the significant energy overlap between the higher-lying dxy band and the dxz/dyz band works against the JT distortion's. When epitaxially strained, this overlap is reduced by the lowering of the dxyband relative to dxz/dyz as the system gets closer to the nominal integer filling. The degeneracy between the dxz and dyz orbitals is subsequently lifted by the JT distortion, opening a gap in the electronic band structure.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 27, 2023
Augustin Bussy,
Ole Schütt,
Jürg Hutter
- The development of novel double-hybrid density functionals offers new levels of accuracy, and is leading to fresh insights into the fundamental properties of matter. Hartree–Fock exact exchange and correlated wave function methods such as MP2 and direct RPA are usually required to build such functionals. Their high computational cost is a concern, and their application to large and periodic systems is therefore limited. In this work, low-scaling methods for HFX, SOS-MP2 and direct RPA energy gradients are developed and implemented in the CP2K software package. The use of the resolution-of-the-identity approximation with a short range metric and atom-centered basis functions lead to sparsity, allowing for sparse tensor contractions to take place. These operations are efficiently performed with the newly developed DBT and DBM libraries, which scale to hundreds of GPU nodes. The resulting methods, RI-HFX, SOS-MP2 and dRPA, were benchmarked on large supercomputers. They exhibit ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 24, 2023
Krisztina Regős,
Rémy Pawlak,
Xing Wang,
Ernst Meyer,
Silvio Decurtins,
Gábor Domokos,
Kostya S. Novoselov,
Shi-Xia Liu,
Ulrich Aschauer
- Molecular self-assembly plays a very important role in various aspects of technology as well as in biological systems. Governed by covalent, hydrogen or van der Waals interactions - self-assembly of alike molecules results in a large variety of complex patterns even in two dimensions (2D). Prediction of pattern formation for 2D molecular networks is extremely important, though very challenging, and so far, relied on computationally involved approaches such as density functional theory, classical molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, or machine learning. Such methods, however, do not guarantee that all possible patterns will be considered and often rely on intuition. Here we introduce a much simpler, though rigorous, hierarchical geometric model founded on the mean-field theory of 2D polygonal tessellations to predict extended network patterns based on molecular-level information. Based on graph theory, this approach yields pattern classification and pattern prediction within ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 22, 2023
Flaviano José dos Santos,
Nicola Marzari
- Smearing techniques are widely used in first-principles calculations of metallic and magnetic materials, where they improve the accuracy of Brillouin zone sampling and lessen the impact of level-crossing instabilities. Smearing introduces a fictitious electronic temperature that smooths the discontinuities of the integrands; consequently, a corresponding fictitious entropic term arises and needs to be considered in the total free energy functional. Advanced smearing techniques – such as Methfessel-Paxton and cold smearing – have been introduced to guarantee that the system’s total free energy remains independent of the smearing temperature at least up to the second order. In doing so, they give rise to non-monotonic occupation functions (and, for Methfessel-Paxton, non-positive definite), which can result in the chemical potential not being uniquely defined. We explore this shortcoming in detail and introduce a numerical protocol utilizing Newton’s minimization method that is able ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 20, 2023
Yannick Schubert,
Nicola Marzari,
Edward Linscott
- Koopmans spectral functionals are a class of orbital-density-dependent functionals designed to accurately predict spectroscopic properties. They do so markedly better than their Kohn-Sham density-functional theory counterparts, as demonstrated in earlier works on benchmarks of molecules and bulk systems. This work is a complementary study where --- instead of comparing against real, many-electron systems --- we test Koopmans spectral functionals on Hooke's atom, a toy two-electron system that has analytical solutions for particular strengths of its harmonic confining potential. As these calculations clearly illustrate, Koopmans spectral functionals do an excellent job of describing Hooke's atom across a range of confining potential strengths. This work also provides broader insight into the features and capabilities of Koopmans spectral functionals more generally.
Latest version: v3
Publication date: Mar 17, 2023
Javier Fernandez Troncoso,
Yang Hu,
Nicolo Maria della Ventura,
Amit Sharma,
Xavier Maeder,
Vladyslav Turlo
- Twinning is an important deformation mode in plastically deformed hexagonal close-packed materials. The extremely high twin growth rates at the nanoscale make atomistic simulations an attractive method for investigating the role of individual twin/matrix interfaces such as twin boundaries and basal-prismatic interfaces in twin growth kinetics. Unfortunately, there is no single framework that allows researchers to differentiate such interfaces automatically, neither in experimental in-situ transmission electron microscopy analysis images nor in atomistic simulations. Moreover, the presence of alloying elements introduces substantial noise to local atomic environments, making it nearly impossible to identify which atoms belong to which interface. Here, with the help of advanced machine learning methods, we provide a proof-of-concept way of using the local stress field distribution as an indicator for the presence of interfaces and for determining their types. We apply such an ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 15, 2023
Ryuhei Sato,
Kazuto Akagi,
Shigeyuki Takagi,
Kartik Sau,
Kazuaki Kisu,
Hao Li,
Shin-ichi Orimo
- Topological data analysis based on persistent homology has been applied to the molecular dynamics simulation for the fast ion-conducting phase (α-phase) of AgI, to show its effectiveness on the ion-migration mechanism analysis. Time-averaged persistence diagrams of α-AgI, which quantitatively records the shape and size of the ring structures in the given atomic configurations, clearly showed the emergence of the four-membered rings formed by two Ag and two I ions at high temperatures. They were identified as common structures during the Ag ion migration. The averaged potential energy change due to the deformation of four-membered ring agrees well with the activation energy calculated from the conductivity Arrhenius plot. The concerted motion of two Ag ions via the four-membered ring was also successfully extracted from molecular dynamics simulations by our approach, providing the new insight into the specific mechanism of the concerted motion.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 14, 2023
Pinelopi Moutzouri,
Manuel Cordova,
Bruno Simões de Almeida,
Daria Torodii,
Lyndon Emsley
- One key bottleneck of solid-state NMR spectroscopy is that ¹H NMR spectra of organic solids are often very broad due to the presence of a strong network of dipolar couplings. We have recently suggested a new approach to tackle this problem. More specifically, we parametrically mapped errors leading to residual dipolar broadening into a second dimension and removed them in a correlation experiment. In this way pure isotropic proton (PIP) spectra were obtained that contain only isotropic shifts and provide the highest ¹H NMR resolution available today in rigid solids. Here, using a deep-learning method, we extend the PIP approach to a second dimension, and for samples of L-tyrosine hydrochloride and ampicillin we obtain high resolution ¹H-¹H double-quantum/single-quantum dipolar correlation and spin-diffusion spectra with significantly higher resolution than the corresponding spectra at 100 kHz MAS, allowing the identification of previously overlapped isotropic correlation peaks.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 10, 2023
Miki Bonacci,
Elisa Molinari,
Deborah Prezzi
- The conversion of semimetallic suspended graphene (Gr) to a large-gap semiconducting phase is realized by controlled adsorption of atomic hydrogen (deuterium) on free-standing Gr veils in nanoporous graphene. The effects of local rehybridization from sp² to sp³ chemical bonding are investigated by combining X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy (HREELS) with ab-initio based modelling. The hydrogen adatoms on the C sites induce a stretching frequency, clearly identified in vibrational spectra thanks to the use of the D isotope, which is compatible with the predicted fingerprints of adsorption on both sides of Gr corresponding to the graphane configuration. HREELS of the deuterated samples shows a wide opening of the optical band gap, consistent with the modified spectral density observed in the valence band photoemission. The results are in agreement with ab-initio calculations by GW and Bethe-Salpeter equation approaches, showing a ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Mar 10, 2023
Chiheb Ben Mahmoud,
Andrea Anelli,
Gábor Csányi,
Michele Ceriotti
- The electronic density of states (DOS) quantifies the distribution of the energy levels that can be occupied by electrons in a quasiparticle picture and is central to modern electronic structure theory. It also underpins the computation and interpretation of experimentally observable material properties such as optical absorption and electrical conductivity. We discuss the challenges inherent in the construction of a machine-learning (ML) framework aimed at predicting the DOS as a combination of local contributions that depend in turn on the geometric configuration of neighbors around each atom, using quasiparticle energy levels from density functional theory as training data. We present a challenging case study that includes configurations of silicon spanning a broad set of thermodynamic conditions, ranging from bulk structures to clusters and from semiconducting to metallic behavior. We compare different approaches to represent the DOS, and the accuracy of predicting quantities ...
Latest version: v2
Publication date: Mar 08, 2023
Giuseppe Fisicaro,
Bastian Schaefer,
Jonas A. Finkler,
Stefan Goedecker
- In this work we study isomers of several representative small clusters to find principles for their stability. Our conclusions about the principles underlying the structure of clusters are based on a huge database of 44'000 isomers generated for 59 different clusters on the density functional theory level by Minima Hopping. We explore the potential energy surface of small neutral, anionic and cationic isomers, moving left to right across the third period of the periodic table and varying the number of atoms n and the cluster charge state q (X^q_n, with X={Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ge}, q=-1,0,1,2). We use structural descriptors such as bond lengths and atomic coordination numbers, the surface to volume ratios and the shape factor as well as electronic descriptors such as shell filling and hardness to detect correlations with the stability of clusters. The isomers of metallic clusters are found to be structure seekers with a strong tendency to adopt compact shapes. However certain numbers ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 06, 2023
Francesco Tavanti,
Arrigo Calzolari
- The concept of order in disordered materials is the key to controlling the mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties of amorphous compounds widely exploited in industrial applications and daily life. Rather, it is far from being understood. Here, we propose a multi-technique numerical approach to study the order/disorder of amorphous materials on both the short- and the medium-range scale. We combine the analysis of the disorder level based on chemical and physical features with their geometrical and topological properties, defining a previously unexplored interplay between the different techniques and the different order scales. We applied this scheme to amorphous GeSe and GeSeTe chalcogenides, showing a modulation of the internal disorder as a function of the stoichiometry and composition: Se-rich systems are less ordered than Ge-rich systems at the short- and medium-range length scales. The present approach can be easily applied to more complex systems containing three or ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 05, 2023
Luca Binci,
Michele Kotiuga,
Iurii Timrov,
Nicola Marzari
- For decades transition-metal oxides have generated a huge interest due to the multitude of physical phenomena they exhibit. In this class of materials, the rare-earth nickelates, RNiO₃, stand out for their rich phase diagram stemming from complex couplings between the lattice, electronic and magnetic degrees of freedom. Here, we present a first-principles study of the low-temperature phase for two members of the RNiO₃ series, with R = Pr, Y. We employ density-functional theory with Hubbard corrections accounting not only for the on-site localizing interactions among the Ni-3d electrons (U), but also the inter-site hybridization effects between the transition-metals and the ligands (V). All the U and V parameters are calculated from first-principles using density-functional perturbation theory, resulting in a fully ab initio methodology. Our simulations show that the inclusion of the inter-site interaction parameters V is necessary to simultaneously capture the features ...
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 02, 2023
Amine Slassi,
Linda-Sheila Medondjio,
Andrea Padovani,
Francesco Tavanti,
Xu He,
Sergiu Clima,
Daniele Garbin,
Ben Kaczer,
Luca Larcher,
Pablo Ordejón,
Arrigo Calzolari
- The choice of the ideal material employed in selector devices is a tough task both from the theoretical and experimental side, especially due to the lack of a synergistic approach between techniques able to correlate specific material properties with device characteristics. Using a material-to-device multiscale technique, a reliable protocol for an efficient characterization of the active traps in amorphous GeSe chalcogenide is proposed. The resulting trap maps trace back the specific features of materials responsible for the measured findings, and connect them to an atomistic description of the sample. The metrological approach can be straightforwardly extended to other materials and devices, which is very beneficial for an efficient material-device codesign and the optimization of novel technologies.
Latest version: v1
Publication date: Mar 02, 2023
