Beschreibung von Oberflächenphänomenen durch relativistische Clusterrechnungen unter Verwendung eines Einbettungsverfahrens
For the theoretical investigation of local phenomena (adsorption at surfaces, defects or impurities within a crystal, etc.) one can assume that the effects caused by the local disturbance are only limited to the neighbouring particles. With this model, that is well-known as cluster-approximation, an infinite system can be simulated by a much smaller segment of the surface (Cluster). The size of this segment varies strongly for different systems. Calculations to the convergence of bond distance and binding energy of an adsorbed aluminum atom on an Al(100)-surface showed that more than 100 atoms are necessary to get a sufficient description of surface properties. However with a full-quantummechanical approach these system sizes cannot be calculated because of the effort in computer memory and processor speed. Therefore we developed an embedding procedure for the simulation of surfaces and solids, where the whole system is partitioned in several parts which itsself are treated differently: the internal part (cluster), which is located near the place of the adsorbate, is calculated completely self-consistently and is embedded into an environment, whereas the influence of the environment on the cluster enters as an additional, external potential to the relativistic Kohn-Sham-equations. The basis of the procedure represents the density functional theory. However this means that the choice of the electronic density of the environment constitutes the quality of the embedding procedure. The environment density was modelled in three different ways: atomic densities; of a large prepended calculation without embedding transferred densities; bulk-densities (copied). The embedding procedure was tested on the atomic adsorptions of 'Al on Al(100) and Cu on Cu(100). The result was that if the environment is choices appropriately for the Al-system one needs only 9 embedded atoms to reproduce the results of exact slab-calculations. For the Cu-system first calculations without embedding procedures were accomplished, with the result that already 60 atoms are sufficient as a surface-cluster. Using the embedding procedure the same values with only 25 atoms were obtained. This means a substantial improvement if one takes into consideration that the calculation time increased cubically with the number of atoms. With the embedding method Infinite systems can be treated by molecular methods. Additionally the program code was extended by the possibility to make molecular-dynamic simulations. Now it is possible apart from the past calculations of fixed cores to investigate also structures of small clusters and surfaces. A first application we made with the adsorption of Cu on Cu(100). We calculated the relaxed positions of the atoms that were located close to the adsorption site and afterwards made the full-quantummechanical calculation of this system. We did that procedure for different distances to the surface. Thus a realistic adsorption process could be examined for the first time. It should be remarked that when doing the Cu reference-calculations (without embedding) we begun to parallelize the entire program code. Only because of this aspect the investigations for the 100 atomic Cu surface-clusters were possible. Due to the good efficiency of both the parallelization and the developed embedding procedure we will be able to apply the combination in future. This will help to work on more these areas it will be possible to bring in results of full-relativistic molecular calculations, what will be very interesting especially for the regime of heavy systems.
@phdthesis{urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-1880, author ={Jacob, Timo}, title ={Beschreibung von Oberflächenphänomenen durch relativistische Clusterrechnungen unter Verwendung eines Einbettungsverfahrens}, keywords ={530 and Clusterphysik}, copyright ={https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/}, language ={de}, school={Kassel, Universität, FB 18, Naturwissenschaften, Institut für Physik}, year ={2005-02-02} }