Dr Joseph Prentice

Abstract:

Calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) is one of the major mineral components of the lower mantle, but has been the subject of relatively little work compared to the more abundant Mg-based materials. One of the major problems related to CaSiO3 that is still the subject of research is its crystal structure under lower mantle conditions – a cubic Pm¯3m structure is accepted in general, but some have suggested that lower-symmetry structures may be relevant. In this work, we use a fully first principles vibrational self-consistent field (VSCF) method to perform high accuracy anharmonic vibrational calculations on several candidate structures at a variety of points along the geotherm near the base of the lower mantle, in order to investigate the stability of the cubic structure and related distorted structures. Our results show that the cubic structure is the most stable throughout the lower mantle, and that this result is robust against the effects of thermal expansion.

Abstract:

High-level vibrational calculations have been used to investigate anharmonicity in a wide variety of materials using density-functional-theory (DFT) methods. We have developed a new and efficient approach for describing strongly-anharmonic systems using a vibrational self-consistent-field (VSCF) method. By far the most computationally expensive part of the calculations is the mapping of an accurate Born-Oppenheimer (BO) energy surface within the region of interest. Here we present an improved method which reduces the computational cost of the mapping. In this approach we use data from a set of energy calculations for different vibrational distortions of the materials and the corresponding forces on the atoms. Results using both energies and forces are presented for the test cases of the hydrogen molecule, solid hydrogen under high pressure including mapping of two-dimensional subspaces of the BO surface, and the bcc phases of the metals Li and Zr. The use of forces data speeds up the anharmonic calculations by up to 40%.

Abstract:

First-principles density functional theory methods are used to investigate the structure, energetics, and vibrational motions of the neutral vacancy defect in diamond. The measured optical absorption spectrum demonstrates that the tetrahedral Td point group symmetry of pristine diamond is maintained when a vacancy defect is present. This is shown to arise from the presence of a dynamic Jahn-Teller distortion that is stabilized by large vibrational anharmonicity. Our calculations further demonstrate that the dynamic Jahn-Teller-distorted structure of Td symmetry is lower in energy than the static Jahn-Teller distorted tetragonal D2d vacancy defect, in agreement with experimental observations. The tetrahedral vacancy structure becomes more stable with respect to the tetragonal structure by increasing temperature. The large anharmonicity arises mainly from quartic vibrations, and is associated with a saddle point of the Born-Oppenheimer surface and a minimum in the free energy. This study demonstrates that the behavior of Jahn-Teller distortions of point defects can be calculated accurately using anharmonic vibrational methods. Our work will open the way for first-principles treatments of dynamic Jahn-Teller systems in condensed matter.