Periodic calculations electronic structure

Within the tight-binding (TB) approach. Slater and Roster [64] described the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) method as an eflRcient scheme for calculation of the electronic structure of periodic solids. As this method is computationally much less demanding than other methods such as the plane-wave methods, it has been extensively employed to calculate electronic structures of various metals, semiconductors, clusters and a number of complex systems such as alloys and doped systems. The calculation of the electronic structure requires solving the Schrodinger equation with the TB Hamiltonian given by... 

Guided by a judicious combination of consideration of the calculated electronic structures, the periodic table (as shown in Figs 24.1 and 24.2X and various well-established qualitative chemical theories, scientists have been able to make some detailed predictions of the chemical properties of the superheavy elements. Of course, at first these elements will at best be produced one atom at a time , and they offer scant hope for ultimate production in the macroscopic quantities that would be required to verify some of these predictions. However, many of the predicted specific macroscopic properties, as well as the more general properties predicted for the other elements, will be useful in designing tracer experiments for the chemical identification of any of these elements that might be synthesized. 

Iditional importance is that the vibrational modes are dependent upon the reciprocal e vector k. As with calculations of the electronic structure of periodic lattices these cal-ions are usually performed by selecting a suitable set of points from within the Brillouin. For periodic solids it is necessary to take this periodicity into account the effect on the id-derivative matrix is that each element x] needs to be multiplied by the phase factor k-r y). A phonon dispersion curve indicates how the phonon frequencies vary over tlie luin zone, an example being shown in Figure 5.37. The phonon density of states is ariation in the number of frequencies as a function of frequency. A purely transverse ition is one where the displacement of the atoms is perpendicular to the direction of on of the wave in a pmely longitudinal vibration tlie atomic displacements are in the ition of the wave motion. Such motions can be observed in simple systems (e.g. those contain just one or two atoms per unit cell) but for general three-dimensional lattices of the vibrations are a mixture of transverse and longitudinal motions, the exceptions... 

We have extended the linear combination of Gaussian-type orbitals local-density functional approach to calculate the total energies and electronic structures of helical chain polymers[35]. This method was originally developed for molecular systems[36-40], and extended to two-dimensionally periodic sys-tems[41,42] and chain polymers[34j. The one-electron wavefunctions here are constructed from a linear combination of Bloch functions c>>, which are in turn constructed from a linear combination of nuclear-centered Gaussian-type orbitals Xylr) (in ihis case, products of Gaussians and the real solid spherical harmonics). The one-electron density matrix is given by... 

In this paper, the electronic structure of disordered Cu-Zn alloys are studied by calculations on models with Cu and Zn atoms distributed randomly on the sites of fee and bcc lattices. Concentrations of 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90% are used. The lattice spacings are the same for all the bcc models, 5.5 Bohr radii, and for all the fee models, 6.9 Bohr radii. With these lattice constants, the atomic volumes of the atoms are essentially the same in the two different crystal structures. Most of the bcc models contain 432 atoms and the fee models contain 500 atoms. These clusters are periodically reproduced to fill all space. Some of these calculations have been described previously. The test that is used to demonstrate that these clusters are large enough to be self-averaging is to repeat selected calculations with models that have the same concentration but a completely different arrangement of Cu and Zn atoms. We found differences that are quite small, and will be specified below in the discussions of specific properties. 

The LSDA approach requires simultaneous self-consistent solutions of the Schrbdinger and Poisson equations. This was accomplished using the Layer Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker technique which has many useful features for calculations of properties of layered systems. It is, for example, one of only a few electronic structure techniques that can treat non-periodic infinite systems. It also has the virtue that the computational time required for a calculation scales linearly with the number of different layers, not as the third power as most other techniques. 

And yet in spite of these remarkable successes such an ab initio approach may still be considered to be semi-empirical in a rather specific sense. In order to obtain calculated points shown in the diagram the Schrodinger equation must be solved separately for each of the 53 atoms concerned in this study. The approach therefore represents a form of "empirical mathematics" where one calculates 53 individual Schrodinger equations in order to reproduce the well known pattern in the periodicities of ionization energies. It is as if one had performed 53 individual experiments, although the experiments in this case are all iterative mathematical computations. This is still therefore not a general solution to the problem of the electronic structure of atoms. 

Since plane waves are delocalised and of infinite spatial extent, it is natural to perform these calculations in a periodic environment and periodic boundary conditions can be used to enforce this periodicity. Periodic boundary conditions for an isolated molecule are shown schematically in Fig. 8. The molecular problem then becomes formally equivalent to an electronic structure calculation for a periodic solid consisting of one molecule per unit cell. In the limit of large separation between molecules, the molecular electronic structure of the isolated gas phase molecule is obtained accurately. 

Fig. 8. Illustration of the use of periodic boundary conditions in the determination of molecular electronic structure. The unit cell is shown by the dashed line. As the unit cell size is increased the calculated properties converge toward those of the isolated molecule...

Single slab. A number of recent calculations of surface electronic structures have shown that the essential electronic and structural features of the bulk material are recovered only a few atomic layers beneath a metal surface. Thus, it is possible to model a surface by a single slab consisting of 5-15 atomic layers with two-dimensional translational symmetry parallel to the surface and vacuum above and below the slab. Using the two-dimensional periodicity of the slab (or thin film), a band-structure approach with two-dimensional periodic boundary conditions can be applied to the surface electronic structure. 

Our study has been restricted to molecules containing only first-row atoms and with wavefunctions dominated by one determinant. Molecules such as 03 are less accurately described, with an error of about 10 kJ/mol at the CCSD(T) level of theory. For such multiconfigurational systems, more elaborate treatments are necessary and no programs are yet available for routine applications. As we go down the periodic table, relativistic effects become more important and the electronic structures more complicated. Therefore, for such systems it is presently not possible to calculate thermochemical data to the same accuracy as for closed-shell molecules containing first-row atoms. Nevertheless, systems with wave-functions dominated by single determinant are by far the most abundant and it is promising that the accuracy of a few kJ/mol is obtainable for them. 

In the last decade, quantum-chemical investigations have become an integral part of modern chemical research. The appearance of chemistry as a purely experimental discipline has been changed by the development of electronic structure methods that are now widely used. This change became possible because contemporary quantum-chemical programs provide reliable data and important information about structures and reactivities of molecules and solids that complement results of experimental studies. Theoretical methods are now available for compounds of all elements of the periodic table, including heavy metals, as reliable procedures for the calculation of relativistic effects and efficient treatments of many-electron systems have been developed [1, 2] For transition metal (TM) compounds, accurate calculations of thermodynamic properties are of particularly great usefulness due to the sparsity of experimental data. 

The structure and dynamics of clean metal surfaces are also of importance for understanding surface reactivity. For example, it is widely held that reactions at steps and defects play major roles in catalytic activity. Unfortunately a lack of periodicity in these configurations makes calculations of energetics and structure difficult. When there are many possible structures, or if one is interested in dynamics, first-principle electronic structure calculations are often too time consuming to be practical. The embedded-atom method (EAM) discussed above has made realistic empirical calculations possible, and so estimates of surface structures can now be routinely made. 

A theoretical foundation for understanding these correlations is found in the calculated bulk electronic structures of the first- and second-row TMS. The electronic environment of the metal surrounded by six sulfur atoms in an octahedral configuration was calculated, using the hypotheses that all the sulfides could be represented by this symmetry as an approximation. There are several electronic factors that appear to be related to catalytic activity the orbital occupation of the HOMO (Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital), the degree of covalency of the metal-sulfur bond, and the metal-sulfur bond strength. These factors were incorporated into an activity parameter (A2), which correlates well with the periodic trends (Fig. 16) (74, 75). This parameter is equal to the product of the number of electrons contained in the... 

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