Thermal effects on lattice strain in hcp Fe under pressure

TL;DR

This study investigates how temperature and pressure influence the lattice strain in nonmagnetic hcp iron using advanced computational methods, revealing small anharmonic effects and validating the PIC model for high-temperature properties.

Contribution

It compares first-principles and PIC models for hcp Fe, demonstrating their agreement and limitations near lattice instability, and clarifies previous discrepancies in PIC results.

Findings

PIC and LMTO methods agree well for stable hcp Fe

Anharmonic effects are small up to melting temperature

PIC model accurately predicts vibrational properties away from instability

Abstract

We compute the c/a lattice strain versus temperature for nonmagnetic hcp iron at high pressures using both first-principles linear response quasiharmonic calculations based on the full potential linear-muffin-tin-orbital (LMTO) method and the particle-in-cell (PIC) model for the vibrational partition function using a tight-binding total-energy method. The tight-binding model shows excellent agreement with the all-electron LMTO method. When hcp structure is stable, the calculated geometric mean frequency and Helmholtz free energy of hcp Fe from PIC and linear response lattice dynamics agree very well, as does the axial ratio as a function of temperature and pressure. On-site anharmonicity proves to be small up to the melting temperature, and PIC gives a good estimate of its sign and magnitude. At low pressures, hcp Fe becomes dynamically unstable at large c/a ratios, and the PIC model might fail where the structure approaches lattice instability. The PIC approximation describes well the vibrational behavior away from the instability, and thus is a reasonable approach to compute high temperature properties of materials. Our results show significant differences from earlier PIC studies, which gave much larger axial ratio increases with increasing temperature, or reported large differences between PIC and lattice dynamics results.