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Note: This article is part of the JCP Special Topic on Electronic Structure Software.

We include the treatment of quadrupolar fields beyond the Fröhlich interaction in the first-principles electron-phonon vertex in semiconductors. Such quadrupolar fields induce long-range interactions that have to be taken into account for accurate physical results. We apply our formalism to Si (nonpolar), GaAs, and GaP (polar) and demonstrate that electron mobilities show large errors if dynamical quadrupoles are not properly treated.

We describe a new approach to compute the electron-phonon self-energy and carrier mobilities in semiconductors. Our implementation does not require a localized basis set to interpolate the electron-phonon matrix elements, with the advantage that computations can be easily automated. Scattering potentials are interpolated on dense q meshes using Fourier transforms and ab initio models to describe the long-range potentials generated by dipoles and quadrupoles. To reduce significantly the computational cost, we take advantage of crystal symmetries and employ the linear tetrahedron method and double-grid integration schemes, in conjunction with filtering techniques in the Brillouin zone. We report results for the electron mobility in Si, GaAs, and GaP obtained with this new methodology.

Transparent conducting materials (TCMs) are required in many applications from solar cells to transparent electronics. Developing high performance materials combining the antagonistic properties of transparency and conductivity has been challenging especially for p-type materials. Recently, high-throughput ab initio computational screening has emerged as a formidable tool for accelerating materials discovery. In this review, we discuss how this approach has been applied for identifying TCMs. We provide a brief overview of the different materials properties of importance for TCMs (e.g., dopability, effective mass, and transparency) and present the ab initio techniques available to assess them. We focus on the accuracy of the methodologies as well as their suitability for high-throughput computing. Finally, we review the different high-throughput computational studies searching for new TCMs and discuss their differences in terms of methodologies and main findings.