Alfredo A. Correa

Carbon under extreme conditions: Phase boundaries and electronic properties from first-principles theory

At high pressure and temperature, the phase diagram of elemental carbon is poorly known. We present predictions of diamond and BC8 melting lines and their phase boundary in the solid phase, as obtained from first-principles calculations. Maxima are found in both melting lines, with a triple point located at ≈850 GPa and ≈7,400 K. Our results show that hot, compressed diamond is a semiconductor that undergoes metalization upon melting. In contrast, in the stability range of BC8, an insulator to metal transition is likely to occur in the solid phase. Close to the diamond/liquid and BC8/liquid boundaries, molten carbon is a low-coordinated metal retaining some covalent character in its bonding up to extreme pressures. Our results provide constraints on the carbon equation of state, which is of critical importance for devising models of Neptune, Uranus, and white dwarf stars, as well as of extrasolar carbon-rich planets.

Multiphase equation of state for carbon addressing high pressures and temperatures

We present a 5-phase equation of state for elemental carbon which addresses a wide range of density and temperature conditions: 3g/cc 100000K(bothfor ρ between3and12g/cc,withselecthigher-ρ DFTcalculationsas well). The liquid free energy model includes an atom-in-jellium approach to account for the effects of ionization due to temperature and pressure in the plasma state, and an ion-thermal model which includes the approach to the ideal gas limit. The precise manner in which the ideal gas limit is reached is greatly constrained by both the highest-temperature DFT data and the path integral data, forcing us to discard an ion-thermal model we had used previously in favor of a new one. Predictions are made for the principal Hugoniot and the room-temperature isotherm, and comparisons are made to recent experimental results.

Local Effects in the X-ray Absorption Spectrum of Salt Water

Both first-principles molecular dynamics and theoretical X-ray absorption spectroscopy have been used to investigate the aqueous solvation of cations in 0.5 M MgCl(2), CaCl(2), and NaCl solutions. We focus here on the species-specific effects that Mg(2+), Ca(2+), and Na(+) have on the X-ray absorption spectrum of the respective solutions. For the divalent cations, we find that the hydrogen-bonding characteristics of the more rigid magnesium first-shell water molecules differ from those in the more flexible solvation shell surrounding calcium. In particular, the first solvation shell water molecules of calcium are able to form acceptor hydrogen bonds, and this results in an enhancement of a post-edge peak near 540 eV. The absence of acceptor hydrogen bonds for magnesium first shell water molecules provides an explanation for the experimental and theoretical observation of a lack of enhancement at the post-main-edge peak. For the sodium monovalent cation we find that the broad tilt angle distribution results in a broadening of postedge features, despite populations in donor-and-acceptor configurations consistent with calcium. We also present the reaveraged spectra of the MgCl(2), CaCl(2), and NaCl solutions and show that trends apparent with increasing concentration (0.5, 2.0, 4.0 M) are consistent with experiment. Finally, we examine more closely both the effect that cation coordination number has on the hydrogen-bonding network and the relative perturbation strength of the cations on lone pair oxygen orbitals.

Plane-wave pseudopotential implementation of explicit integrators for time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations in large-scale simulations

Explicit integrators for real-time propagation of time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations are compared regarding their suitability for performing large-scale simulations. Four algorithms are implemented and assessed for both stability and accuracy within a plane-wave pseudopotential framework, employing the adiabatic approximation to the exchange-correlation functional. Simulation results for a single sodium atom and a sodium atom embedded in bulk magnesium oxide are discussed. While the first-order Euler scheme and the second-order finite-difference scheme are unstable, the fourth-order Runge-Kutta scheme is found to be conditionally stable and accurate within this framework. Excellent parallel scalability of the algorithm up to more than a thousand processors is demonstrated for a system containing hundreds of electrons, evidencing the suitability for large-scale simulations based on real-time propagation of time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations.

Measurement of Electron-Ion Relaxation in Warm Dense Copper

Experimental investigation of electron-ion coupling and electron heat capacity of copper in warm and dense states are presented. From time-resolved x-ray absorption spectroscopy, the temporal evolution of electron temperature is obtained for non-equilibrium warm dense copper heated by an intense femtosecond laser pulse. Electron heat capacity and electron-ion coupling are inferred from the initial electron temperature and its decrease over 10 ps. Data are compared with various theoretical models.

Role of Surface Termination on Hot Electron Relaxation in Silicon Quantum Dots: A First-Principles Dynamics Simulation Study.

The role of surface termination on phonon-mediated relaxation of an excited electron in quantum dots was investigated using first-principles simulations. The surface terminations of a silicon quantum dot with hydrogen and fluorine atoms lead to distinctively different relaxation behaviors, and the fluorine termination shows a nontrivial relaxation process. The quantum confined electronic states are significantly affected by the surface of the quantum dot, and we find that a particular electronic state dictates the relaxation behavior through its infrequent coupling to neighboring electronic states. Dynamical fluctuation of this electronic state results in a slow shuttling behavior within the manifold of unoccupied electronic states, controlling the overall dynamics of the excited electron with its characteristic frequency of this shuttling behavior. The present work revealed a unique role of surface termination, dictating the hot electron relaxation process in quantum-confined systems in the way that has not been considered previously.

Quantum Dynamics Simulation of Electrons in Materials on High-Performance Computers

Advancement in high-performance computing allows us to calculate properties of increasingly complex materials with unprecedented accuracy. At the same time, to take full advantage of modern leadership-class supercomputers, the calculations need to scale well on hundreds of thousands of processing cores. We demonstrate such high scalability of our recently developed implementation of Ehrenfest non-adiabatic electron-ion dynamics up to 1 million floating-point processing units on two different leadership-class computing architectures. As a representative example of material properties that derive from quantum dynamics of electrons, we demonstrate the accurate calculation of electronic stopping power, which characterizes the rate of energy transfer from a high-energy particle to electrons in materials. We discuss the specific case of crystalline gold with a hydrogen atom as the high-energy particle, and we illustrate detailed scientific insights that can be obtained from the quantum dynamics simulation at the electronic structure level. Please note that two animation videos of the time evolution for Figure 3 are available as Web extras at http://youtu.be/WxiMZ2DVBbM and http://youtu.be/bAcaxF9ARzM.

Electronic band structure effects in the stopping of protons in copper

We present an ab initio study of the electronic stopping power of protons in copper over a wide range of proton velocities

Electron-phonon thermalization in a scalable method for real-time quantum dynamics

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Cement As a Waste Form for Nuclear Fission Products: The Case of (90)Sr and Its Daughters.

where we take into account nonlinear effects. Time-dependent density functional theory coupled with molecular dynamics is used to study electronic excitations produced by energetic protons. A plane-wave pseudopotential scheme is employed to solve the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations for a moving ion in a periodic crystal. The electronic excitations and the band structure determine the stopping power of the material and alter the interatomic forces for both channeling and off-channeling trajectories. Our off-channeling results are in quantitative agreement with experiments, and at low velocity they unveil a crossover region of superlinear velocity dependence (with a power of