Ca-VII: a chain ordered host-guest structure of calcium above 210 GPa

High-Temperature Superconducting Phase in Clathrate Calcium Hydride CaH_{6} up to 215 K at a Pressure of 172 GPa

The recent discovery of superconductive rare earth and actinide superhydrides has ushered in a new era of superconductivity research at high pressures. This distinct type of clathrate metal hydrides was first proposed for alkaline-earth-metal hydride CaH_{6} that, however, has long eluded experimental synthesis, impeding an understanding of pertinent physics. Here, we report successful synthesis of CaH_{6} and its measured superconducting critical temperature T_{c} of 215 K at 172 GPa, which is evidenced by a sharp drop of resistivity to zero and a characteristic decrease of T_{c} under a magnetic field up to 9 T. An estimate based on the Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg model gives a giant zero-temperature upper critical magnetic field of 203 T. These remarkable benchmark superconducting properties place CaH_{6} among the most outstanding high-T_{c} superhydrides, marking it as the hitherto only clathrate metal hydride outside the family of rare earth and actinide hydrides. This exceptional case raises great prospects of expanding the extraordinary class of high-T_{c} superhydrides to a broader variety of compounds that possess more diverse material features and physics characteristics.

Pressure tuned incommensurability and guest structure transition in compressed scandium from machine learning atomic simulation

Scandium (Sc) is the lightest non-main-group element and transforms to a host-guest (H-G) incommensurate structure under gigapascal (GPa) pressures. While the host structure is stable over a wide pressure range, the guest structure may exist in multiple forms, featuring different incommensurate ratios, and mixing up to generate long-range "disordered" guest structures. Here, we employed the recently developed global neural network (g-NN) potential and the stochastic surface walking (SSW) global optimization algorithm to explore the global potential energy surface of Sc under various pressures. We probe the global minima structure in a system made of hundreds of atoms and revealed that the solid-phase transition between Sc-I and H-G Sc-II phases is fully reconstructive in nature. Above 62.5 GPa, the pressure will further destabilize the face-centered tetragonal (fct, Sc-IIa) guest structure to a body-centered tetragonal phase (bct, Sc-IIb), while sustaining the host structure. The structural transition mechanism of this work will shed light on the nature of the complex H-G structural modifications in compressed metals.

On the chain-melted phase of matter

Various single elements form incommensurate crystal structures under pressure, where a zeolite-type "host" sublattice surrounds a "guest" sublattice comprising 1D chains of atoms. On "chain melting," diffraction peaks from the guest sublattice vanish, while those from the host remain. Diffusion of the guest atoms is expected to be confined to the channels in the host sublattice, which suggests 1D melting. Here, we present atomistic simulations of potassium to investigate this phenomenon and demonstrate that the chain-melted phase has no long-ranged order either along or between the chains. This 3D disorder provides the extensive entropy necessary to make the chain melt a true thermodynamic phase of matter, yet with the unique property that diffusion remains confined to 1D only. Calculations necessitated the development of an interatomic forcefield using machine learning, which we show fully reproduces potassium's phase diagram, including the chain-melted state and 14 known phase transitions.

Pressure-Induced Structural and Electronic Transition in Sr2ZnWO6 Double Perovskite

High-pressure structural and electrical properties of Sr2ZnWO6 double perovskite were investigated using in situ angle-dispersive synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman, and alternating current (AC) impedance spectroscopy. A structural transition from monoclinic (P21/n) to triclinic (P1̅) phase around 9 GPa was observed due to the pressure-induced distortion of (W, Zn)O6 octahedron. In situ high-pressure Raman spectroscopy showed the increasing interaction among O-W-O in WO6 octahedron with pressure and a transition pressure consistent with the XRD results. From the AC impedance spectroscopy measurements, the resistivity increased steeply by ∼1 order of magnitude around 11 GPa, indicating an electronic transition accompanying the symmetry change. The increase in the interaction among O-W-O enhances the attraction of O(2-) electrons toward W(6+), thus increasing the covalence, which in turn lowers the charge transfer energy between O(2-) and W(6+) and induces the resistivity increase under high pressure.

Investigation of exotic stable calcium carbides using theory and experiment

It is well known that pressure causes profound changes in the properties of atoms and chemical bonding, leading to the formation of many unusual materials. Here we systematically explore all stable calcium carbides at pressures from ambient to 100 GPa using variable-composition evolutionary structure predictions using the USPEX code. We find that Ca₅C₂, Ca₂C, Ca₃C₂, CaC, Ca₂C₃ and CaC₂ have stability fields on the phase diagram. Among these, Ca₂C and Ca₂C₃ are successfully synthesized for the first time via high-pressure experiments with excellent structural correspondence to theoretical predictions. Of particular significance is the base-centred monoclinic phase (space group C2/m) of Ca₂C, a quasi-two-dimensional metal with layers of negatively charged calcium atoms, and the primitive monoclinic phase (space group P2₁/c) of CaC with zigzag C₄ groups. Interestingly, strong interstitial charge localization is found in the structure of R-3m-Ca₅C₂ with semi-metallic behaviour.

Pressure causes profound changes in the properties of atoms and chemical bonding leading to unusual materials. Here, the authors investigate the Ca-C system and find that it becomes increasingly complex and develops a multitude of phases with various compositions and new structures at higher pressures.

Orbital free ab initio simulations of liquid alkaline earth metals: from pseudopotential construction to structural and dynamic properties

We have performed a comprehensive study of the properties of liquid Be, Ca and Ba, through the use of orbital free ab initio simulations. To this end we have developed a force-matching method to construct the necessary local pseudopotentials from standard ab initio calculations. The structural magnitudes are analyzed, including the average and local structures and the dynamic properties are studied. We find several common features, like an asymmetric second peak in the structure factor, a large amount of local structures with five-fold symmetry, a quasi-universal behaviour of the single-particle dynamic properties and a large degree of positive dispersion in the propagation of collective density fluctuations, whose damping is dictated by slow thermal relaxations and fast viscoelastic ones. Some peculiarities in the dynamic properties are however observed, like a very high sound velocity and a large violation of the Stokes-Einstein relation for Be, or an extremely high positive dispersion and a large slope in the dispersion relation of shear waves at the onset of the wavevector region where they are supported for Ba.

High-pressure X-ray science on the ultimate storage ring

The advent of the ESRF, APS and SPring-8 third-generation synchrotron sources in the mid-1990s heralded a golden age of high-pressure X-ray science. The high-energy monochromatic micro-focused X-ray beams from these storage rings, combined with the new high-pressure diffraction and spectroscopy techniques developed in the late 1980s, meant that researchers were immediately able to make detailed structural studies at pressures comparable with those at the centre of the Earth, studies that were simply not possible only five years previously. And new techniques, such as X-ray inelastic scattering and X-ray nuclear scattering, became possible at high pressure for the first time, providing wholly-new insight into the behaviour of materials at high densities. The arrival of new diffraction-limited storage rings, with their much greater brightness, and ability to achieve focal-spot diameters for high-energy X-ray beams of below 1 µm, offers the possibility of a new generation of high-pressure science, both extending the scope of what is already possible, and also opening ways to wholly-new areas of investigation.

Structural simplicity and complexity of compressed calcium: electronic origin

A simple cubic structure with one atom in the unit cell found in compressed calcium is counterintuitive to the traditional view of a tendency towards densely packed structures with an increase in pressure. To understand this unusual transformation it is necessary to assume electron transfer from the outer core band to the valence band, and an increase of valence electron number for calcium from 2 to ∼ 3.5. This assumption is supported by the Fermi sphere-Brillouin zone interaction model that increases under compression. The recently found structure of Ca-VII with a tetragonal cell containing 32 atoms (tI32) is similar to that in the intermetallic compound In5Bi3 with 3.75 valence electrons per atom. Structural relations are analyzed in terms of electronic structure resemblance. Correlations of structure and physical properties of Ca are discussed.

Structures of the elements - crystallography and art

Since simple data tables on phase transitions and structural systematics of the elements over a wide range of pressure and temperature are difficult to comprehend, this paper illustrates these systematics with some artwork together with an artist's view of the equations of states for the elements.

Computational materials discovery: the case of the W–B system

By means of variable-compositional evolutionary algorithms, in combination with first-principles calculations, the compositions, structures and mechanical properties of the W–B system have been theoretically investigated. As well as confirming the experimental observations (including their crystal structures) for the four known compounds W2B, WB, WB2and WB3, the new stable compound W8B7and two nearly stable compounds, W2B3and WB4, have also been predicted in the ground state. The elastic properties and estimated Vickers hardnesses of all these borides have been systematically derived. The results show that, among these borides,hP6-WB2exhibits the largest ultra-incompressibility along thecaxis, with the highestC33value (953 GPa, comparable with that of the most incompressible diamond).hP16-WB3exhibits the highest hardness of 36.9 GPa, in good agreement with the experimentally measured data from 28.1 to 43.3 GPa, close to the superhard threshold, andoC8-WB shows the highest bulk modulus of about 350 GPa. The new stable compound W8B7crystallizes in the monoclinicmP15 phase, with infinite zigzag B chains running parallel to the W-atom layers, resulting in a relatively high estimated hardness of 19.6 GPa. The anisotropic Young's modulusEand torsion shear modulusGthave been derived for bothoC8-WB andhP16-WB3. The current state of research and the historic inconsistency of the W–B system are briefly summarized, in particular clarifying the fact that the previous experimentally attributedhP20-WB4is in fact the defect-containinghP16-WB3.