Integrated structural reconstruction of unit structures of the meta-stable grain boundaries in diamond-structured materials presents first-order like phase transition.

Abstract

One of the important issues of studying grain boundaries (GBs) which has recently attracted increasing interests is to investigate the phase behavior of GBs that one GB with determined disorientation and plane orientation (known as macroscopic parameters) can exist as distinct phases and perform phase transition. While such an issue has been investigated in fcc and bcc metals, GB phases in other elemental materials have not been reported. This work by applying molecular dynamics (MD) simulation explored totally around 7000 meta-stable GB phases of the <110>∑9(22‾1‾) symmetric tilt GB of silicon, germanium and diamond carbon as diamond-structured elemental materials. Meta-stable phases commonly exist in different elements were discovered and some of them were successfully verified to be reasonable by first-principle simulation. The verified meta-stable GBs were subsequently proved to have different capability to transform to the ground-stable GB at elevated temperature under MD simulation and to perform different pre-melting behaviors. We discovered a bi-directional structural reconstruction mechanism of the unit structure belonging to one of the verified meta-stable phases, by which the unit structures can transform to identical unit structures of the ground-stable GB which can present ‘opposite orientation’. Through computing the kinetic barriers by nudged-elastic-band and annealing simulation using MD, the integral behavior of the unit structures’ reconstruction is found to be a first-order like phase transition. Our work extended the research on GB phases from metals to diamond-structured materials and discovered a new GB phase transition mechanism which has not been reported before.