Lattice dynamics : From fundamental research to practical applications

Abstract: The reason to perform calculations in material science usually falls into one of two categories: to predict or explain the origin of material properties. This thesis covers first-principle calculations for solids at extreme conditions, from both of the two mentioned categories. I primarily have studied the effects of high-pressure and high-temperature on lattice dynamics, mechanical and electronic properties. To treat the effects of temperature, ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations and self-consistent phonon calculations, based on density functional theory, have been utilised. These approaches account for the temperature effects by considering thermally excited supercells as samples of a statistical ensemble. To extract properties from this representation, I have used methods which maps the supercell data to a unit cell representation or fits it to a simple model Hamiltonian.The small displacement method was used to analyse the dynamical stability for nitrides and polymorphs of silica, synthesised at high-pressure in a diamond anvil cell. The nitride compounds consist of a high amount of nitrogen either as chains, forming a porous framework together with transition metal atoms or as dinitrogen molecules, occupying the channels of the framework. The nitrogen chains consist of single- or double-bonded nitrogen atoms, making these compounds highly energetic. Polymorphs of silica can be used to model deep Earth liquids. These new polymorphs, named coesite-IV and coesite-V, consist of four-, five-, and six-oriented silicon. Some of the octahedra of the six-oriented silicon atoms, of these new phases, are sharing faces, which according to Pauling's third rule would make them highly unstable. My phonon calculations indicate these phases to be dynamically stable. Furthermore, my calculations predict higher compressibility for these new phases compared to the competing ones. By modelling silicate melts with coesite-IV and coesite-V, a more complex and compressible structure is expected, affecting the predicted seismic behaviour.I studied Kohn anomalies for body-centered cubic niobium by simulating this material with self-consistent phonon calculations. The electronic structure was studied by using a band unfolding technique, for which I obtained an effective unit cell representation of the electronic structure at elevated temperatures. Temperature primarily smeared the electronic states but did not induce significant shifts of the bands. In parallel, the anharmonicity of this system was studied using the temperature dependent effective potential method. Even close to the melting temperature, this element is remarkably harmonic. The experimentally observed disappearance of the Kohn anomalies with increased temperature is predominantly dependent, according to my calculations, on the temperature-induced smearing of the electronic states.Using stress-strain relations, accurate high-temperature elastic properties were predicted for Ti0.5Al0.5N. The simulations were performed with AIMD. The stresses were fitted using the least-squares method to a linear expression from which the elastic constants were derived. The results were compared with previously performed calculations that employed additional approximations. The results of the symmetry imposed force constant temperature dependent effective potential (SIFC-TDEP) method agrees well with our results. I also compared my results with TiN calculations that employed a similar methodology. My and the SIFC-TDEP results are reporting lower values for the polycrystalline moduli than the calculations for TiN. The data I generated were also used for a machine learned interatomic potential method, where moment tensor potentials were trained and evaluated, using this data.