Related papers: Assessing the stability fields of molecular and po…
Carbon can exist as isolated dumbbell, one-dimensional (1D) chain, 2D plane, and 3D network in carbon solids or carbon-based compounds, which attributes to its rich chemical binding way, including sp-, sp2-, and sp3-hybridized bonds. Sp2…
A novel allotrope of carbon with $P2/m$ symmetry was identified during an \emph{ab-initio} minima-hopping structural search which we call $M10$-carbon. This structure is predicted to be more stable than graphite at pressures above 14.4 GPa…
Tellurium trioxide, TeO3, is the only example of a trioxide adopting at ambient conditions the VF3-type structure (a distorted variant of the cubic ReO3 structure). Here we present a combined experimental (Raman scattering) and theoretical…
We study the phase behaviour of a binary mixture of colloidal hard spheres and freely-jointed chains of beads using Monte Carlo simulations. Recently Panagiotopoulos and coworkers predicted [Nat. Commun. 5, 4472 (2014)] that the hexagonal…
The complex crystal chemistry of elemental boron has led to numerous proposed structures with distinctive motifs as well as contradictory findings. Herein, evolutionary structure searches performed at 100 GPa have uncovered a series of…
We have studied solid hydrogen up to pressures of 300 GPa and temperatures of 350 K using density functional theory methods and have found "mixed structures" that are more stable than those predicted earlier. Mixed structures consist of…
By performing constant-pressure variable-cell ab initio molecular dynamics simulations we find a quadrupolar orthorhombic structure, of $Pca2_1$ symmetry, for the broken symmetry phase (phase II) of solid H2 at T=0 and P =110 - 150 GPa. We…
Crystal structure searching and ab initio calculations have been used here to explore low-energy structures of boron carbides under high pressure. Under pressures of 85-110 GPa, a metastable B6C with R-3m symmetry is found to be…
We use ab initio density functional calculations to study the formation and structural as well as thermal stability of cellular foam-like carbon nanostructures. These systems with a mixed $sp^2/sp^3$ bonding character may be viewed as…
A class of iridium hydrides, IrH_x (x=0.5, 1-4, 6), is calculated at ab-initio level using the DFT. A number of hydrides are predicted to stabilize in the excess hydrogen environment and upon compression. The threshold pressure for…
Boron carbide exhibits intrinsic substitutional disorder over a broad composition range. The structure consists of 12-atom icosahedra placed at the vertices of a rhombohedral lattice, together with a 3-atom chain along the 3-fold axis. In…
It is well known that pressure causes profound changes in the properties of atoms and chemical bonding, leading to the formation of many unusual materials. Here we systematically explore all stable calcium carbides at pressures from ambient…
For Y$_2$C$_3$ with a superconducting critical temperature (T$_c$) $\sim$18 K, zone-center imaginary optical phonon modes have been found for the high-symmetry $I$-$43d$ structure due to C dimer wobbling motion and electronic instability…
Recent data have determined that the structure of the high pressure $\epsilon$ phase of solid oxygen consists of clusters composed of four O$_2$ molecules. This finding has opened the question about the nature of the intermolecular…
Cubic gauche polynitrogen (cg-N) is an attractive high-energy density material. However, high-pressure synthesized cg-N will decompose at low-pressure and cannot exist at ambient conditions. Here, the stabilities of cg-N surfaces with and…
By employing first-principles metadynamics simulations, we explore the 300 K structures of solid hydrogen over the pressure range 150-300 GPa. At 200 GPa, we find the ambient-pressure disordered hexagonal close-packed (hcp) phase transited…
For three-dimensional piecewise-smooth systems of ordinary differential equations, this paper characterises the stability of points that belong to a switching surface and are equilibria of exactly one of the two neighbouring pieces of the…
Nitrogen represents an archetypal example of material exhibiting a pressure driven transformation from molecular to polymeric state. Detailed investigations of such transformations are challenging because of a large kinetic barrier between…
High-pressure polymeric structures of nitrogen have attracted great attention owing to their potential application as high-energy-density materials. We report the density functional structural prediction of the unexpected stabilization of a…
The pressure-induced transformation of diatomic nitrogen into non-molecular polymeric phases may produce potentially useful high-energy-density materials. We combine first-principles calculations with structure searching to predict a new…