Jussi Enkovaara

Birth of the localized surface plasmon resonance in monolayer-protected gold nanoclusters.

Gold nanoclusters protected by a thiolate monolayer (MPC) are widely studied for their potential applications in site-specific bioconjugate labeling, sensing, drug delivery, and molecular electronics. Several MPCs with 1-2 nm metal cores are currently known to have a well-defined molecular structure, and they serve as an important link between molecularly dispersed gold and colloidal gold to understand the size-dependent electronic and optical properties. Here, we show by using an ab initio method together with atomistic models for experimentally observed thiolate-stabilized gold clusters how collective electronic excitations change when the gold core of the MPC grows from 1.5 to 2.0 nm. A strong localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) develops at 540 nm (2.3 eV) in a cluster with a 2.0 nm metal core. The protecting molecular layer enhances the LSPR, while in a smaller cluster with 1.5 nm gold core, the plasmon-like resonance at 540 nm is confined in the metal core by the molecular layer. Our results demonstrate a threshold size for the emergence of LSPR in these systems and help to develop understanding of the effect of the molecular overlayer on plasmonic properties of MPCs enabling engineering of their properties for plasmonic applications.

Coexistence of ferro- and antiferromagnetic order in Mn-doped Ni

Ni-Mn-Ga is interesting as a prototype of a magnetic shape-memory alloy showing large magnetic-field-induced strains. We present here results for the magnetic ordering of Mn-rich Ni-Mn-Ga alloys based on both experiments and theory. Experimental trends for the composition dependence of the magnetization are measured by a vibrating sample magnetometer in magnetic fields of up to several tesla and at low temperatures. The saturation magnetization has a maximum near the stoichiometric composition and it decreases with increasing Mn content. This unexpected behavior is interpreted via first-principles calculations within the density-functional theory. We show that extra Mn atoms are antiferromagnetically aligned to the other moments, which explains the dependence of the magnetization on composition. In addition, the effect of Mn doping on the stabilization of the structural phases and on the magnetic anisotropy energy is demonstrated.

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We present the implementation of the time-dependent density-functional theory both in linear-response and in time-propagation formalisms using the projector augmented-wave method in real-space grids. The two technically very different methods are compared in the linear-response regime where we found perfect agreement in the calculated photoabsorption spectra. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two methods as well as their convergence properties. We demonstrate different applications of the methods by calculating excitation energies and excited state Born-Oppenheimer potential surfaces for a set of atoms and molecules with the linear-response method and by calculating nonlinear emission spectra using the time-propagation method.

MnGa

We model a Kohn-Sham potential with a discontinuity at integer particle numbers derived from the GLLB approximation of Gritsenko et al. We evaluate the Kohn-Sham gap and the discontinuity to obtain the quasiparticle gap. This allows us to compare the Kohn-Sham gaps to those obtained by accurate many-body perturbation theory based optimized potential methods. In addition, the resulting quasiparticle band gap is compared to experimental gaps. In the GLLB model potential, the exchange-correlation hole is modeled using a GGA energy density and the response of the hole to density variations is evaluated by using the common-denominator approximation and homogeneous electron gas based assumptions. In our modification, we have chosen the PBEsol potential as the GGA to model the exchange hole, and add a consistent correlation potential. The method is implemented in the GPAW code, which allows efficient parallelization to study large systems. A fair agreement for Kohn-Sham and the quasiparticle band gaps with semiconductors and other band gap materials is obtained with a potential which is as fast as GGA to calculate.

Time-dependent density-functional theory in the projector augmented-wave method.

A characteristic feature of the state-of-the-art of real-space methods in electronic structure calculations is the diversity of the techniques used in the discretization of the relevant partial differential equations. In this context, the main approaches include finite-difference methods, various types of finite-elements and wavelets. This paper reports on the results of several code development projects that approach problems related to the electronic structure using these three different discretization methods. We review the ideas behind these methods, give examples of their applications, and discuss their similarities and differences.

Kohn-Sham potential with discontinuity for band gap materials

We observe using ab initio methods that localized surface plasmon resonances in icosahedral silver nanoparticles enter the asymptotic region already between diameters of 1 and 2 nm, converging close to the classical quasistatic limit around 3.4 eV. We base the observation on time-dependent density-functional theory simulations of the icosahedral silver clusters Ag-55 (1.06 nm), Ag-147 (1.60 nm), Ag-309 (2.14 nm), and Ag-561 (2.68 nm). The simulation method combines the adiabatic GLLB-SC exchange-correlation functional with real time propagation in an atomic orbital basis set using the projector-augmented wave method. The method has been implemented for the electron structure code GPAW within the scope of this work. We obtain good agreement with experimental data and modeled results, including photoemission and plasmon resonance. Moreover, we can extrapolate the ab initio results to the classical quasistatically modeled icosahedral clusters.

Three real-space discretization techniques in electronic structure calculations

We present an implementation of parallel GPU-accelerated GPAW, a density-functional theory (DFT) code based on grid based projector-augmented wave method. GPAW is suitable for large scale electronic structure calculations and capable of scaling to thousands of cores. We have accelerated the most computationally intensive components of the program with CUDA. We will provide performance and scaling analysis of our multi-GPU-accelerated code staring from small systems up to systems with thousands of atoms running on GPU clusters. We have achieved up to 15 times speed-ups on large systems.

Localized surface plasmon resonance in silver nanoparticles: Atomistic first-principles time-dependent density-functional theory calculations

Density function theory (DFT) is the most widely employed electronic structure method because of its favorable scaling with system size and accuracy for a broad range of molecular and condensed‐phase systems. The advent of massively parallel supercomputers has enhanced the scientific communitys ability to study larger system sizes. Ground‐state DFT calculations on ∼ 103 valence electrons using traditional ON3 algorithms can be routinely performed on present‐day supercomputers. The performance characteristics of these massively parallel DFT codes on > 104 computer cores are not well understood. The GPAW code was ported an optimized for the Blue Gene/P architecture. We present our algorithmic parallelization strategy and interpret the results for a number of benchmark test cases.Copyright