Luis A. Mancera

First principles calculations of the ground state properties and structural phase transformation in YN

We have studied the structural and electronic properties of YN in rock salt (sodium chloride), caesium chloride, zinc blende and wurtzite structures using first-principles total energy calculations. Rock salt is the calculated ground state structure with a = 4.93 A, B0 = 157 GPa. The experimental lattice constant is a = 4.877 A. There is an additional local minimum in the wurtzite structure with total energy 0.28 eV/unit cell higher. At high pressure (~ 138 GPa), our calculations predict a phase transformation from a NaCl to a CsCl structure.

Yttrium nitride thin films grown by reactive laser ablation

Abstract Yttrium nitride thin films were grown on silicon substrates by laser ablating an yttrium target in molecular nitrogen environments. The composition and chemical state were determined with Auger electron, X-Ray photoelectron, and energy loss spectroscopies. The reaction between yttrium and nitrogen is very effective using this method. Ellipsometry measurements indicate that the films are metallic. We attribute this behavior to a small oxygen contamination. Each oxygen atom introduces two additional electrons to the unit cell, resulting in a complex semiconductor–ionic–metallic system. These results are corroborated by first principles total energy calculations of clean and oxygen doped YN.

Towards a scalable and accurate quantum approach for describing vibrations of molecule–metal interfaces

Summary We present a theoretical framework for the computation of anharmonic vibrational frequencies for large systems, with a particular focus on determining adsorbate frequencies from first principles. We give a detailed account of our local implementation of the vibrational self-consistent field approach and its correlation corrections. We show that our approach is both robust, accurate and can be easily deployed on computational grids in order to provide an efficient computational tool. We also present results on the vibrational spectrum of hydrogen fluoride on pyrene, on the thiophene molecule in the gas phase, and on small neutral gold clusters.

The nature and role of the gold-krypton interactions in small neutral gold clusters

We investigate the nature and role of krypton embedding in small neutral gold clusters. For some of these clusters, we observe a particular site-dependent character of the Kr binding that does not completely follow the criterion of binding at low-coordinated sites, widely accepted for interaction of a noble gas with closed-shell metal systems such as metal surfaces. We aim at understanding the effect of low dimensionality and open-shell electronic structure of the odd-numbered clusters on the noble gas-metal cluster interaction. First, we investigate the role of attractive and repulsive forces, and the frontier molecular orbitals. Second, we investigate the Au-Kr interaction in terms of reactivity and bonding character. We use a reactivity index derived from Fukui formalism, and criteria provided by the electron localization function (ELF), in order to classify the type of bonding. We carry out this study on the minimum energy structures of neutral gold clusters, as obtained using pseudo potential plane-wave density functional theory (DFT). A model is proposed that includes the effect of attractive electrostatic, van der Waals and repulsive forces, together with effects originating from orbital overlap. This satisfactorily explains minimum configurations of the noble gas-gold cluster systems, the site preference of the noble gas atoms, and changes in electronic properties.