English

Ground-State Structures of Ice at High-Pressures

Other Condensed Matter 2013-05-29 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Materials Science Computational Physics

Abstract

\textit{Ab initio} random structure searching based on density functional theory is used to determine the ground-state structures of ice at high pressures. Including estimates of lattice zero-point energies, ice is found to adopt three novel crystal phases. The underlying sub-lattice of O atoms remains similar among them, and the transitions can be characterized by reorganizations of the hydrogen bonds. The symmetric hydrogen bonds of ice X and PbcmPbcm are initially lost as ice transforms to structures with symmetries Pmc21Pmc2_1 (800 - 950 GPa) and P21P2_1 (1.17 TPa), but they are eventually regained at 5.62 TPa in a layered structure C2/mC2/m. The P21C2/mP2_1 \rightarrow C2/m transformation also marks the insulator-to-metal transition in ice, which occurs at a significantly higher pressure than recently predicted.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.1941,
  title  = {Ground-State Structures of Ice at High-Pressures},
  author = {Jeffrey M. McMahon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.1941},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

10 pages; 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:20:18.199Z