Self-consistent phonons revisited. I. The role of thermal versus quantum fluctuations on structural transitions in large Lennard-Jones clusters.
The theory of self-consistent phonons (SCP) was originally developed to address the anharmonic effects in condensed matter systems. The method seeks a harmonic, temperature-dependent Hamiltonian that provides the "best fit" for the physical Hamiltonian, the "best fit" being defined as the one that optimizes the Helmholtz free energy at a fixed temperature. The present developments provide a scalable O(N) unified framework that accounts for anharmonic effects in a many-body system, when it is probed by either thermal (ℏ → 0) or quantum fluctuations (T → 0). In these important limits, the solution of the nonlinear SCP equations can be reached in a manner that requires only the multiplication of 3N × 3N matrices, with no need of diagonalization. For short range potentials, such as Lennard-Jones, the Hessian, and other related matrices are highly sparse, so that the scaling of the matrix multiplications can be reduced from O(N(3)) to ~O(N). We investigate the role of quantum effects by continuously varying the de-Boer quantum delocalization parameter Λ and report the N-Λ (T = 0), and also the classical N-T (Λ = 0) phase diagrams for sizes up to N ~ 10(4). Our results demonstrate that the harmonic approximation becomes inadequate already for such weakly quantum systems as neon clusters, or for classical systems much below the melting temperatures.
Chemistry Department, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA. ionutg@gmail.com
Ionuţ
I
Georgescu
Vladimir A
VA
Mandelshtam