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Stable and fast ionic conductors for magnesium cathode materials have the prospect of enabling high energy density batteries beyond current Lithium-ion technologies. So far, only a few candidate materials have been identified leading to data only being scarcely available to the community. Here, we present a systematic study, in the framework of Density Functional Theory, including the estimation of the diffusion barrier for 16 materials through employing Nudged Elastic Band (NEB) calculations. By introducing a path finder algorithm based on the idea of Voronoi tessellations, we show that an estimate of the transition state configuration can be extracted automatically prior to running NEB-calculations. Using geometrical descriptors in combination with a principal component analysis it is possible to further sub-group the diffusion paths. This approach also extends to materials which are not part of the study, making it a viable approach to more efficiently explore crystal structures with distinguishable diffusion characteristics., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures

Materials exhibiting a substitutional disorder such as multicomponent alloys and mixed metal oxides/oxyfluorides are of great importance in many scientific and technological sectors. Disordered materials constitute an overwhelmingly large configurational space, which makes it practically impossible to be explored manually using first-principles calculations such as density functional theory (DFT) due to the high computational costs. Consequently, the use of methods such as cluster expansion (CE) is vital in enhancing our understanding of the disordered materials. CE dramatically reduces the computational cost by mapping the first-principles calculation results on to a Hamiltonian which is much faster to evaluate. In this work, we present our implementation of the CE method, which is integrated as a part of the Atomic Simulation Environment (ASE) open-source package. The versatile and user-friendly code automates the complex set up and construction procedure of CE while giving the users the flexibility to tweak the settings and to import their own structures and previous calculation results. Recent advancements such as regularization techniques from machine learning are implemented in the developed code. The code allows the users to construct CE on any bulk lattice structure, which makes it useful for a wide range of applications involving complex materials. We demonstrate the capabilities of our implementation by analyzing the two example materials with varying complexities: a binary metal alloy and a disordered lithium chromium oxyfluoride.

The two-dimensional metal forming at the interface between an oxide insulator and SrTiO3 provides new opportunities for oxide electronics. However, the quantum Hall effect, one of the most fascinating effects of electrons confined in two dimensions, remains underexplored at these complex oxide heterointerfaces. Here, we report the experimental observation of quantized Hall resistance in a SrTiO3 heterointerface based on the modulation-doped amorphous-LaAlO$_{3}$/SrTiO$_{3}$ heterostructure, which exhibits both high electron mobility exceeding 10000 cm$^{2}$/Vs and low carrier density on the order of ~10$^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$. Along with unambiguous Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations, the spacing of the quantized Hall resistance suggests that the interface is comprised of a single quantum well with ten parallel conducting two-dimensional subbands. This provides new insight into the electronic structure of conducting oxide interfaces and represents an important step towards designing and understanding advanced oxide devices.

A new approach to approximate the kinetic-energy-functional dependent component ($v_t[\rho_A,\rho_B](\vec{r})$) of the effective potential in one-electron equations for orbitals embedded in a frozen density environment (Eqs. 20-21 in [Wesolowski and Warshel, {\it J. Phys. Chem.} {\bf 97}, (1993) 8050]) is proposed. The exact limit for $v_t$ at $\rho_A\longrightarrow 0$ and $\int \rho_B d\vec{r}=2$ is enforced. The significance of this limit is analysed formally and numerically for model systems including a numerically solvable model and real cases where $\int \rho_B d\vec{r}=2$. A simple approximation to $v_t[\rho_A,\rho_B](\vec{r})$ is constructed which enforces the considered limit near nuclei in the environment. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the numerical significance of the considered limit for real systems - intermolecular complexes comprising, non-polar, polar, charged constituents. Imposing the limit improves significantly the quality of the approximation to $v_t[\rho_A,\rho_B](\vec{r})$ for systems comprising charged components. For complexes comprising neutral molecules or atoms the improvement occurs as well but it is numerically insignificant.