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HL: Fachverband Halbleiterphysik

HL 48: Thermoelectricity

HL 48.4: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 15. März 2018, 17:45–18:00, EW 015

Understanding chemical ordering in intermetallic clathrates from atomic scale simulations — •Mattias Ångqvist and Paul Erhart — Chalmers, Sweden

Intermetallic clathrates exhibit great variability with respect to elemental composition and distribution. While this provides a lot of flexibility for tuning properties it also poses a challenge with regard to developing a comprehensive understanding of these systems. In this study we employ a combination of alloy cluster expansions and density functional theory calculations to exhaustively sample the compositional space with ab-initio accuracy. Using this methodology we study chemical ordering and associated properties in the clathrate systems Ba₈Al_xSi_46−x, Ba₈Al_xGe_46−x, Ba₈Ga_xGe_46−x, and Ba₈Ga_xSi_46−x as a function of composition and temperature. We achieve very good agreement with the available experimental data for the site occupancy factors (SOFs) even for stoichiometries beyond the composition range considered during construction of the cluster expansions. This validation enables us to resolve trends in the experimental data and explain non-monotonic variations of the SOFs. In particular, we provide a rationale for the pronounced composition dependence of the SOFs in Al based clathrates. Furthermore, we quantify the effect of chemical ordering on both heat capacity and lattice expansion. Finally, we determine the effect of chemical disorder on the displacements of the guest species (Ba), which enables us to at least partially explain experimental observations of the nuclear density of Ba in different clathrates.