Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme
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MM: Fachverband Metall- und Materialphysik
MM 7: Transport I: Electronic and thermal transport
MM 7.4: Talk
Monday, March 7, 2016, 12:15–12:30, H53
Thermal Conductivities in Solids from First Principles: Accurate Computations and Rapid Estimates — •Christian Carbogno and Matthias Scheffler — Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin
In spite of significant research efforts, a first-principles determination of the thermal conductivity κ at high temperatures has remained elusive. Boltzmann transport techniques that account for anharmonicity perturbatively become inaccurate under such conditions. Ab initio molecular dynamics (MD) techniques using the Green-Kubo (GK) formalism capture the full anharmonicity, but can become prohibitively costly to converge in time and size. We developed a formalism that accelerates such GK simulations by several orders of magnitude and that thus enables its application within the limited time and length scales accessible in ab initio MD. For this purpose, we determine the effective harmonic potential occurring during the MD, the associated temperature-dependent phonon properties and lifetimes. Interpolation in reciprocal and frequency space then allows to extrapolate to the macroscopic scale. For both force-field and ab initio MD, we validate this approach by computing κ for Si and ZrO2, two materials known for their particularly harmonic and anharmonic character. Eventually, we demonstrate how these techniques facilitate reasonable estimates of κ from existing MD calculations at virtually no additional computational cost.