A review of the present status, recent enhancements, and applicability of the SIESTA program is presented. Since its debut in the mid-nineties, SIESTA's flexibility, efficiency and free distribution has given advanced materials simulation capabilities to many groups worldwide. The core methodological scheme of SIESTA combines finite-support pseudoatomic orbitals as basis sets, norm-conserving pseudopotentials, and a real-space grid for the representation of charge density and potentials and the computation of their associated matrix elements. Here we describe the more recent implementations on top of that core scheme, which include: full spin-orbit interaction, non-repeated and multiple-contact ballistic electron transport, DFT+U and hybrid functionals, time-dependent DFT, novel reduced-scaling solvers, densityfunctional perturbation theory, efficient Van der Waals non-local density functionals, and enhanced molecular-dynamics options. In addition, a substantial effort has been made in enhancing interoperability and interfacing with other codes and utilities, such as WANNIER90 and the second-principles modelling it can be used for, an AiiDA plugin for workflow automatization, interface to Lua for steering SIESTA runs, and various postprocessing utilities. SIESTA has also been a) Electronic mail:

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In the present study, we have investigated the phonon and thermodynamic properties of bulk zinc-blende CdS by first-principle calculations within the density functional theory (DFT) and the density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) method using the quasi harmonic approximation (QHA). We calculated the phonon dispersion at several high symmetry directions, density of phonon state, temperature dependence feature of Helmholtz free energy (F), internal energy, bulk modulus, constant-volume specific heat, entropy, coefficient of the volume thermal expansion and Grüneisen parameter estimated with the local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximation (GGA) for the exchange-correlation potential and compared them with each other. For internal energy, Helmholtz free energy, constant volume heat capacity and phonon entropy the LDA and GGA results are very similar. But, the LDA gives lattice constants that are smaller than GGA while phonon frequencies, bulk modulus and cohesive energies are larger. On the other hand, the results obtained through the GGA approximation for the coefficient of the volume thermal expansion and Grüneisen parameter are larger than those obtained from LDA.

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Engineering oxygen octahedra rotation patterns in ABO 3 perovskites is a powerful route to design functional materials. Here we propose a strategy that exploits point defects that create local electric dipoles and couple to the oxygen sublattice, enabling direct actuation on the rotational degrees of freedom. This approach, which relies on substituting an A site with a smaller ion, paves a way to couple dynamically octahedra rotations to external electric fields. A common antisite defect, Al La , in rhombohedral LaAlO 3 is taken as a prototype to validate the idea, with atomistic density functional theory calculations supported with an effective lattice model to simulate the dynamics of switching of the local rotational degrees of freedom to long distances. Our simulations provide an insight of the main parameters that govern the operation of the proposed mechanism, and allow to define guidelines for screening other systems where this approach could be used for tuning the properties of the host material.