An Ab Initio Study of Connections between Tensorial Elastic Properties and Chemical Bonds in Sigma5(210) Grain Boundaries in Ni3Si
Loading...
Date
2018-11-13
ORCID
Advisor
Referee
Mark
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Altmetrics
Abstract
Using quantum-mechanical methods we calculate and analyze (tensorial) anisotropic elastic properties of the ground-state configurations of interface states associated with Sigma5(210) grain boundaries (GBs) in cubic L12-structure Ni3Si. We assess the mechanical stability of interface states with two different chemical compositions at the studied GB by checking rigorous elasticity-based Born stability criteria. In particular, we show that a GB variant containing both Ni and Si atoms
at the interface is unstable with respect to shear deformation (one of the elastic constants, C55, is negative). This instability is found for a rectangular-parallelepiped supercell obtained when applying standard coincidence-lattice construction. Our elastic-constant analysis allowed us to identify a shear-deformation mode reducing the energy and, eventually, to obtain mechanically stable ground-state characterized by a shear-deformed parallelepiped supercell. Alternatively, we tested a stabilization of this GB interface state by Al substituents replacing Si atoms at the GB.We further
discuss an atomistic origin of this instability in terms of the crystal orbital Hamilton population (COHP) and phonon dispersion calculations. We find that the unstable GB variant shows a very strong interaction between the Si atoms in the GB plane and Ni atoms in the 3rd plane off the GB interface. However, such bond reinforcement results in weakening of interaction between the Ni atoms in the 3rd plane and the Si atoms in the 5th plane making this GB variant mechanically unstable.
Description
Citation
Document type
Peer-reviewed
Document version
Published version
Date of access to the full text
Language of document
en