ABINIT is a package whose main program allows one to find the total energy, charge density, electronic structure and many other properties of systems made of electrons and nuclei, (molecules and periodic solids) within Density Functional Theory (DFT), Many-Body Perturbation Theory (GW approximation and Bethe-Salpeter equation) and Dynmical Mean Field Theory (DMFT). ABINIT also allows to optimize the geometry according to the DFT forces and stresses, to perform molecular dynamics simulations using these forces, and to generate dynamical matrices, Born effective charges and dielectric tensors. The present paper aims to describe the new capabilities of ABINIT that have been developed since 2009. It covers both physical and technical developments inside the ABINIT code, as well as developments provided within the ABINIT package. The developments are described with relevant references, input variables, tests and tutorials.
We have performed first-principles calculations of the electronic structure of ZnO, and applied them to the determination of structural and lattice-dynamical properties and their dependence on pressure. The dynamical matrices have been obtained for the wurtzite, zinc-blende, and rocksalt modifications with several lattice parameters optimized for pressures up to 12 GPa. These matrices are employed to calculate the one-phonon densities of states ͑DOS͒ and the two-phonon DOS associated with either sums or differences of phonons. These results provide the essential tools to analyze the effect of isotope-induced mass disorder and anharmonicity on phonon linewidths, which we discuss here and compare with experimental data from Raman spectroscopy, including first-and second-order spectra. Agreement of calculated properties with experimental results improves considerably when the renormalization due to anharmonicity is subtracted from the experimental data.
Anomalous Raman modes have been reported in several recent papers dealing with doped-and undoped-ZnO layers grown by different methods. Most of these anomalous Raman modes have been attributed to local vibrational modes of impurities or defects. However, we will show that most of the observed modes correspond to wurtzite-ZnO silent modes allowed by the breakdown of the translational crystal symmetry induced by defects and impurities.
We have theoretically investigated, by ab initio techniques, the phonon properties of several semiconductors with chalcopyrite structure. Comparison with experiments has led us to distinguish between materials with d electrons in the valence band (e.g., CuGaS 2 , AgGaS 2 ) and those without d electrons (e.g., ZnSnAs 2 ). The former exhibit a rather peculiar nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the energy gap which, so far, has resisted cogent theoretical description. We analyze this nonmonotonic temperature dependence by fitting two Bose-Einstein oscillators with weights of opposite sign leading to an increase at low temperatures and a decrease at higher temperatures and find that the energy of the former correlates well with characteristic peaks in the phonon density of states associated with low-energy vibrations of the d-electron elements. We hope that this work will encourage theoretical investigations of the electron-phonon interaction in this direction, especially of the current ab initio type.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.