A critical comparative review of generalized gradient approximation: the ground state of Fe3Al as a test case

0577989 - ÚFM 2024 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Všianská, M. - Friák, Martin - Šob, Mojmír
A critical comparative review of generalized gradient approximation: the ground state of Fe3Al as a test case.
Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering. Roč. 31, č. 8 (2023), č. článku 085022. ISSN 0965-0393. E-ISSN 1361-651X
Institutional support: RVO:68081723
Keywords : electronic structure * intermetallic compounds * generalized-gradient approximation * ground-state crystal structure * metaGGA
OECD category: Condensed matter physics (including formerly solid state physics, supercond.)
Impact factor: 1.8, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-651X/ad084c

Quantum-mechanical calculations have become an indispensable tool for computational materials science due to their unprecedented versatility and reliability. Focusing specifically on the Density Functional Theory (DFT), the reliability of its numerous implementations was tested and verified mostly for pure elements. An extensive testing of binaries, ternaries and more-component phases is still rather rare due to a vast configurational space that is nearly infinite already for binaries. Importantly, there are well known cases of theoretical predictions contradicting experiments. In this paper, we analyze the failure of theory to reproduce correctly the ground state of the Fe3Al intermetallic compound. Namely, most exchange-correlation (xc) energies within the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) predict this material in the L12 structure instead of the experimentally found D03 structure. We test the performance of 36 combinations of 6 different GGA parametrizations and 6 different Fe and Al potentials. These combinations are evaluated employing a multi-dimensional multi-criteria descriptor {$\Delta E$, a, {$\mu^{\mathrm{Fe}}$}, {Cij}} consisting of fundamental thermodynamic properties (energy difference $\Delta E$ between the D03 and L12 structures), a structural aspect (lattice parameter a), electronic-structure related magnetic properties (local magnetic moments of Fe atoms {$\mu^{\mathrm{Fe}}$}) and elastic properties (a complete set of second-order elastic constants {Cij}). Considering the thermodynamic stability as the most critical aspect, we identify the Perdew–Wang (1991) GGA xc-functional parametrization as the optimum for describing the electronic structure of the Fe3Al compound.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0347050