Two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as promising candidates for next-generation electronic and optoelectronic applications. Yet, only a few dozen 2D materials have been successfully synthesized or exfoliated. Here, we search for 2D materials that can be easily exfoliated from their parent compounds. Starting from 108,423 unique, experimentally known 3D compounds, we identify a subset of 5,619 compounds that appear layered according to robust geometric and bonding criteria. High-throughput calculations using van der Waals density functional theory, validated against experimental structural data and calculated random phase approximation binding energies, further allowed the identification of 1,825 compounds that are either easily or potentially exfoliable. In particular, the subset of 1,036 easily exfoliable cases provides novel structural prototypes and simple ternary compounds as well as a large portfolio of materials to search from for optimal properties. For a subset of 258 compounds, we explore vibrational, electronic, magnetic and topological properties, identifying 56 ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems, including half-metals and half-semiconductors.

The conduction of heat in two dimensions displays a wealth of fascinating phenomena of key relevance to the scientific understanding and technological applications of graphene and related materials. Here, we use density-functional perturbation theory and an exact, variational solution of the Boltzmann transport equation to study fully from first-principles phonon transport and heat conductivity in graphene, boron nitride, molybdenum disulphide and the functionalized derivatives graphane and fluorographene. In all these materials, and at variance with typical three-dimensional solids, normal processes keep dominating over Umklapp scattering well-above cryogenic conditions, extending to room temperature and more. As a result, novel regimes emerge, with Poiseuille and Ziman hydrodynamics, hitherto typically confined to ultra-low temperatures, characterizing transport at ordinary conditions. Most remarkably, several of these two-dimensional materials admit wave-like heat diffusion, with second sound present at room temperature and above in graphene, boron nitride and graphane.

We characterize the thermal conductivity of graphite, monolayer graphene, graphane, fluorographane, and bilayer graphene, solving exactly the Boltzmann transport equation for phonons, with phonon-phonon collision rates obtained from density functional perturbation theory. For graphite, the results are found to be in excellent agreement with experiments; notably, the thermal conductivity is 1 order of magnitude larger than what found by solving the Boltzmann equation in the single mode approximation, commonly used to describe heat transport. For graphene, we point out that a meaningful value of intrinsic thermal conductivity at room temperature can be obtained only for sample sizes of the order of 1 mm, something not considered previously. This unusual requirement is because collective phonon excitations, and not single phonons, are the main heat carriers in these materials; these excitations are characterized by mean free paths of the order of hundreds of micrometers. As a result, even Fourier's law becomes questionable in typical sample sizes, because its statistical nature makes it applicable only in the thermodynamic limit to systems larger than a few mean free paths. Finally, we discuss the effects of isotopic disorder, strain, and chemical functionalization on thermal performance. Only chemical functionalization is found to play an important role, decreasing the conductivity by a factor of 2 in hydrogenated graphene, and by 1 order of magnitude in fluorogenated graphene.

Computational science has seen in the last decades a spectacular rise in the scope, breadth, and depth of its efforts. Notwithstanding this prevalence and impact, it is often still performed using the renaissance model of individual artisans gathered in a workshop, under the guidance of an established practitioner. Great benefits could follow instead from adopting concepts and tools coming from computer science to manage, preserve, and share these computational efforts. We illustrate here our paradigm sustaining such vision, based around the four pillars of Automation, Data, Environment, and Sharing. We then discuss its implementation in the open-source AiiDA platform (http://www.aiida.net), that has been tuned first to the demands of computational materials science. AiiDA's design is based on directed acyclic graphs to track the provenance of data and calculations, and ensure preservation and searchability. Remote computational resources are managed transparently, and automation is coupled with data storage to ensure reproducibility. Last, complex sequences of calculations can be encoded into scientific workflows. We believe that AiiDA's design and its sharing capabilities will encourage the creation of social ecosystems to disseminate codes, data, and scientific workflows.

Thermal conductivity in dielectric crystals is the result of the relaxation of lattice vibrations described by the phonon Boltzmann transport equation. Remarkably, an exact microscopic definition of the heat carriers and their relaxation times is still missing: phonons, typically regarded as the relevant excitations for thermal transport, cannot be identified as the heat carriers when most scattering events conserve momentum and do not dissipate heat flux. This is the case for twodimensional or layered materials at room temperature, or three-dimensional crystals at cryogenic temperatures. In this work we show that the eigenvectors of the scattering matrix in the Boltzmann equation define collective phonon excitations, termed here relaxons. These excitations have well defined relaxation times, directly related to heat flux dissipation, and provide an exact description of thermal transport as a kinetic theory of the relaxon gas. We show why Matthiessen's rule is violated, and construct a procedure for obtaining the mean free paths and relaxation times of the relaxons. These considerations are general, and would apply also to other semiclassical transport models, such as the electronic Boltzmann equation. For heat transport, they remain relevant even in conventional crystals like silicon, but are of the utmost importance in the case of two-dimensional materials, where they can revise by several orders of magnitude the relevant time-and length-scales for thermal transport in the hydrodynamic regime. arXiv:1603.02608v3 [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]

The ever-growing availability of computing power and the sustained development of advanced computational methods have contributed much to recent scientific progress. These developments present new challenges driven by the sheer amount of calculations and data to manage. Next-generation exascale supercomputers will harden these challenges, such that automated and scalable solutions become crucial. In recent years, we have been developing AiiDA (aiida.net), a robust open-source high-throughput infrastructure addressing the challenges arising from the needs of automated workflow management and data provenance recording. Here, we introduce developments and capabilities required to reach sustained performance, with AiiDA supporting throughputs of tens of thousands processes/hour, while automatically preserving and storing the full data provenance in a relational database making it queryable and traversable, thus enabling high-performance data analytics. AiiDA’s workflow language provides advanced automation, error handling features and a flexible plugin model to allow interfacing with external simulation software. The associated plugin registry enables seamless sharing of extensions, empowering a vibrant user community dedicated to making simulations more robust, user-friendly and reproducible.

Heat conduction in dielectric crystals originates from the propagation of atomic vibrational waves, whose microscopic dynamics is well described by linearized or generalized phonon Boltzmann transport. Recently, it was shown that the thermal conductivity can be resolved exactly and in a closed form as a sum over relaxons, i.e. the collective phonon excitations that are eigenvectors of Boltzmann equation's scattering matrix [Cepellotti and Marzari, Phys. Rev. X 6, 041013 (2016)]. Relaxons have a well-defined parity and only odd relaxons contribute to the thermal conductivity. Here, we show that the complementary set of even relaxons determines another quantity -the thermal viscosity -that enters into the description of heat transport in the hydrodynamic regime, where dissipation of crystal momentum by Umklapp scattering phases out. We also show how the thermal viscosity and conductivity parametrize two novel viscous heat equations -two coupled equations for the local temperature and drift velocity fields -which represent the thermal counterpart of the Navier-Stokes equations of hydrodynamics in the linear, laminar regime. These viscous heat equations are derived from a coarse-graining of the linearized Boltzmann transport equation for phonons, and encompass both limits of Fourier's law or second sound for strong or weak Umklapp dissipation, respectively. Last, we introduce the Fourier deviation number, a dimensionless parameter that quantifies the steady-state deviations from Fourier's law due to hydrodynamic effects. We showcase these findings in a test case of a complex-shaped device made of silicon or diamond. This formulation generalizes rigorously Fourier's heat equation, and extends the reach of microscopic computational techniques to characterize the fundamental parameters governing heat conduction. * michele.simoncelli@epfl.ch ics. Sussmann and Thellung [12], starting from the linearized BTE (LBTE) in absence of momentumdissipating (Umklapp) phonon-phonon scattering events, derived mesoscopic equations in terms of temperature and phonon drift velocity, the thermal counterpart of pressure and fluid velocity in liquids. Further advances came from Gurzhi [13,14] and Guyer & Krumhansl [15,16] who, including the effect of weak crystal momentum dissipation, obtained equations for damped second sound and Poiseuille heat flow. Among early works, we also mention the discussions on phonon hydrodynamics using approaches different from the LBTE of Refs. [17,18]. While correctly capturing the qualitative features of phonon hydrodynamics, all the theoretical investigations mentioned above are heuristic, e.g. they assume simplified phonon dispersion relations (either power-law [13,14] or linear isotropic [12,15,16]), or neglect momentum dissipation. A more rigorous and general formulation -albeit valid only in the hydrodynamic regime of weak Umklapp scattering -was introduced by Hardy, who extended the discussion of second sound [19] and, together with Albers, of Poiseuille flow in terms of mesoscopic transport equations...

Coupling of the Peierls-Boltzmann equation with density functional theory paved the way for predictive thermal materials discovery and a variety of new physical insights into vibrational transport behaviors. Rapid theoretical and numerical developments have generated a wealth of thermal conductivity data and understanding of a wide variety of materials—1D, 2D, and bulk—for thermoelectric and thermal management applications. Nonetheless, modern ab initio descriptions of phonon thermal transport face challenges regarding the effects of defects, disorder, structural complexity, strong anharmonicity, quasiparticle couplings, and time and spatially varying perturbations. Highlighting recent research on these issues, this perspective explores opportunities to expand current ab initio phonon transport techniques beyond the paradigm of weakly perturbed crystals, to the wider variety of materials possible. Recent developments in phonon-defect interactions, complexity, disorder and anharmonicity, hydrodynamic transport, and the rising roles of molecular dynamics simulations, high throughput, and machine learning tools are included in this perspective. As more sophisticated theoretical and computational methods continue to advance thermal transport predictions, novel vibrational physics and thermally functional materials will be discovered for improved energy technologies.