Microscopic Origins of the Anomalous Melting Behavior of Sodium under High Pressure
X-ray diffraction experiments have shown that sodium exhibits a dramatic pressure-induced drop in melting temperature, which extends from 1000 K at ~30 GPa to as low as room temperature at ~120 GPa. Despite significant theoretical effort to understand the anomalous melting, its origins are still debated. In this work, we reconstruct the sodium phase diagram by using an ab initio quality neural-network potential. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the reentrant behavior results from the screening of interionic interactions by conduction electrons, which at high pressure induces a softening in the short-range repulsion.
Nucleation mechanism for the direct graphite-to-diamond phase transition
Graphite and diamond have comparable free energies, yet forming diamond from graphite is far from easy. In the absence of a catalyst, pressures that are significantly higher than the equilibrium coexistence pressures are required to induce the graphite-to-diamond transition. Furthermore, the formation of the metastable hexagonal polymorph of diamond instead of the more stable cubic diamond is favored at lower temperatures. The concerted mechanism suggested in previous theoretical studies cannot explain these phenomena. Using an ab initio quality neural-network potential we performed a large-scale study of the graphite-to-diamond transition assuming that it occurs via nucleation. The nucleat…
Microscopic origins of the anomalous melting behaviour of high-pressure sodium
Recent experiments have shown that sodium, a prototype simple metal at ambient conditions, exhibits unexpected complexity under high pressure. One of the most puzzling phenomena in the behaviour of dense sodium is the pressure-induced drop in its melting temperature, which extends from 1000 K at ~30GPa to as low as room temperature at ~120GPa. Despite significant theoretical effort to understand the anomalous melting its origins have remained unclear. In this work, we reconstruct the sodium phase diagram using an ab-initio-quality neural-network potential. We demonstrate that the reentrant behaviour results from the screening of interionic interactions by conduction electrons, which at high…
Ab initioquality neural-network potential for sodium
An interatomic potential for high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) crystalline and liquid phases of sodium is created using a neural-network (NN) representation of the ab initio potential energy surface. It is demonstrated that the NN potential provides an ab initio quality description of multiple properties of liquid sodium and bcc, fcc, cI16 crystal phases in the P-T region up to 120 GPa and 1200 K. The unique combination of computational efficiency of the NN potential and its ability to reproduce quantitatively experimental properties of sodium in the wide P-T range enables molecular dynamics simulations of physicochemical processes in HPHT sodium of unprecedented quality.