Nina Shulumba

Bio: Nina Shulumba is an academic researcher from California Institute of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Anharmonicity & Phonon. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 22 publications receiving 528 citations. Previous affiliations of Nina Shulumba include Saarland University & Linköping University.

Intrinsic localized mode and low thermal conductivity of PbSe

Abstract: Lead chalcogenides such as PbS, PbSe, and PbTe are of interest for their exceptional thermoelectric properties and strongly anharmonic lattice dynamics. Although PbTe has received the most attention, PbSe has a lower thermal conductivity and a nonlinear temperature dependence of thermal resistivity despite being stiffer, trends that prior first-principles calculations have not fully reproduced. Here, we use ab initio calculations that explicitly account for strong anharmonicity and a computationally efficient stochastic phase-space sampling scheme to identify the origin of this low thermal conductivity as an anomalously large anharmonic interaction, exceeding in strength that in PbTe, between the transverse optic and longitudinal acoustic branches. The strong anharmonicity is reflected in the striking observation of an intrinsic localized mode that forms in the acoustic frequencies. Our work shows the deep insights into thermal phonons that can be obtained from ab initio calculations that do not rely on perturbations from the ground-state phonon dispersion.

Temperature dependence of TiN elastic constants from ab initio molecular dynamics simulations

Abstract: Elastic properties of cubic TiN are studied theoretically in a wide temperature interval. First-principles simulations are based on ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD). Computational efficiency of ...

Nuclear quantum effect with pure anharmonicity and the anomalous thermal expansion of silicon

Abstract: Despite the widespread use of silicon in modern technology, its peculiar thermal expansion is not well understood. Adapting harmonic phonons to the specific volume at temperature, the quasiharmonic approximation, has become accepted for simulating the thermal expansion, but has given ambiguous interpretations for microscopic mechanisms. To test atomistic mechanisms, we performed inelastic neutron scattering experiments from 100 K to 1,500 K on a single crystal of silicon to measure the changes in phonon frequencies. Our state-of-the-art ab initio calculations, which fully account for phonon anharmonicity and nuclear quantum effects, reproduced the measured shifts of individual phonons with temperature, whereas quasiharmonic shifts were mostly of the wrong sign. Surprisingly, the accepted quasiharmonic model was found to predict the thermal expansion owing to a large cancellation of contributions from individual phonons.

Lattice Vibrations Change the Solid Solubility of an Alloy at High Temperatures.

Abstract: We develop a method to accurately and efficiently determine the vibrational free energy as a function of temperature and volume for substitutional alloys from first principles. Taking Ti_(1−x)Al_xN alloy as a model system, we calculate the isostructural phase diagram by finding the global minimum of the free energy corresponding to the true equilibrium state of the system. We demonstrate that the vibrational contribution including anharmonicity and temperature dependence of the mixing enthalpy have a decisive impact on the calculated phase diagram of a Ti_(1−x)Al_xN alloy, lowering the maximum temperature for the miscibility gap from 6560 to 2860 K. Our local chemical composition measurements on thermally aged Ti_(0.5)Al_(0.5)N alloys agree with the calculated phase diagram.

Intrinsic anharmonic localization in thermoelectric PbSe.

Abstract: Lead chalcogenides have exceptional thermoelectric properties and intriguing anharmonic lattice dynamics underlying their low thermal conductivities. An ideal material for thermoelectric efficiency is the phonon glass–electron crystal, which drives research on strategies to scatter or localize phonons while minimally disrupting electronic-transport. Anharmonicity can potentially do both, even in perfect crystals, and simulations suggest that PbSe is anharmonic enough to support intrinsic localized modes that halt transport. Here, we experimentally observe high-temperature localization in PbSe using neutron scattering but find that localization is not limited to isolated modes – zero group velocity develops for a significant section of the transverse optic phonon on heating above a transition in the anharmonic dynamics. Arrest of the optic phonon propagation coincides with unusual sharpening of the longitudinal acoustic mode due to a loss of phase space for scattering. Our study shows how nonlinear physics beyond conventional anharmonic perturbations can fundamentally alter vibrational transport properties. To optimize the performance of lead chalcogenides for thermoelectric applications, strategies to further reduce the crystal’s thermal conductivity is required. Here, the authors discover anharmonic localized vibrations in PbSe crystals for optimizing the crystal’s vibrational transport properties.

The collected works

Abstract: This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

Introduction to Lattice Dynamics

Abstract: Foreword Acknowledgements Definitions of symbols used 1. Some fundamentals 2. The harmonic approximation and lattice dynamics of very simple systems 3. Dynamics of diatomic crystals: general principles 4. How far do the atoms move? 5. Lattice dynamics and thermodynamics 6. Formal description 7. Acoustic modes and macroscopic elasticity 8. Anharmonic effects and phase transitions 9. Neutron scattering 10. Infrared and Raman spectroscopy 11. Formal quantum mechanical description of lattice vibrations 12. Molecular dynamics simulations Appendices Problems Bibliography Index.

Machine Learning Force Fields

Abstract: In recent years, the use of machine learning (ML) in computational chemistry has enabled numerous advances previously out of reach due to the computational complexity of traditional electronic-structure methods. One of the most promising applications is the construction of ML-based force fields (FFs), with the aim to narrow the gap between the accuracy of ab initio methods and the efficiency of classical FFs. The key idea is to learn the statistical relation between chemical structure and potential energy without relying on a preconceived notion of fixed chemical bonds or knowledge about the relevant interactions. Such universal ML approximations are in principle only limited by the quality and quantity of the reference data used to train them. This review gives an overview of applications of ML-FFs and the chemical insights that can be obtained from them. The core concepts underlying ML-FFs are described in detail, and a step-by-step guide for constructing and testing them from scratch is given. The text concludes with a discussion of the challenges that remain to be overcome by the next generation of ML-FFs.