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The structural and electronic properties of liquid MgSiO3 under pressure are investigated by ab initio molecular-dynamics simulations. At ambient pressure, most of Si atoms have the same coordination even in the liquid state as in the crystalline phase, i.e., each Si atom is bonded to two bridging oxygen (BO), i.e., O atoms twofold-coordinated to Si, and two nonbridging oxygen (NBO), i.e., O atoms onefold-coodinated to Si. It is, however, found that the structural defects, such as fivefold- or threefold-coordinated Si atoms, are always formed with the rearrangement of Si-O covalent bonds in the atomic diffusion processes. The population analysis clarifies that maximum of the diffusivity in the pressure dependence results from the increasing of the number of defects under compression.

We report the effects of system size on melting of dense sodium at about 100 GPa. We have performed systematic ab initio molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations with the number of atoms at most 250 for bcc and 256 for fcc structures based on 3s-valence-electron model and 2p3s-valence-electron model. We have shown that the inner-core 2p states play important roles at extremely high pressures and that the melting temperature estimated by one-phase approach depends on the system size; in particular, the melting temperature for 3s model decreases with increasing system size and deviates from the experimental value, while the melting temperature for the 2p3s model approaches to the experimental value slowly. This result suggests that we have to carry out large-scale ab initio MD simulations with the inner-core 2p states to obtain the melting temperature of dense Na at extremely high pressure.

The microscopic mechanisms of atomic diffusion in liquid GeO2 and SrGeO3 are investigated by ab initio molecular-dynamics simulations. We clarify the differences of diffusion mechanism between liquid GeO2 and SrGeO3. In both liquids, non-bridging oxygen double bonded to only one germanate plays a key role in the atomic diffusion mechanism. It is found that, in liquid SrGeO3 which has non-bridging oxygen in the equilibrium state at ambient pressure, atomic diffusion is possible without generating overcoordinated atoms at ambient pressure, while the over coordinated atoms are always needed for the formation of non-bridging oxygens in liquid GeO2. When the pressure increases, only liquid GeO2 has a diffusion maximum, which is given by, the atomic diffusion with concerted reaction gives the dif fusion maximum.

A linear-scaling algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer (DC) scheme is designed to perform large-scale molecular-dynamics simulations, in which interatomic forces are computed quantum mechanically in the framework of the density functional theory (DFT). This scheme is applied to the thermite reaction at an Al/Fe2O3 interface. It is found that mass diffusion and reaction rate at the interface are enhanced by a concerted metal-oxygen flip mechanism. Preliminary simulations are carried out for an aluminum particle in water based on the conventional DFT, as a target system for large-scale DC-DFT simulations. A pair of Lewis acid and base sites on the aluminum surface preferentially catalyzes hydrogen production in a low activation-barrier mechanism found in the simulations

The hydrogen storage system LiH + NH3 ↔ LiNH2 + H2 is one of the most promising hydrogen storage systems, where the reaction yield can be increased by replacing Li in LiH with other alkali metals (Na or K) in order of Li < Na < K. In this paper, we have studied the alkali metal M (M = Li, Na, K) dependence of the reactivity of MH with NH3 by calculating the potential barrier of the H2 desorption process from the reaction of an M2H2 cluster with an NH3 molecule based on the ab initio structure optimization method. We have shown that the height of the potential barrier becomes lower in order of Li, Na, and K, where the difference of the potential barrier in Li and Na is relatively smaller than that in Na and K, and this tendency is consistent with the recent experimental results. We have also shown that the H-H distance of the H2 dimer at the transition state takes larger distance and the change of the potential energy around the transition state becomes softer in order of Li, Na, and K. There are almost no M dependence in the charge of the H atom in NH3 before the reaction, while that of the H atom in M2H2 takes larger negative value in order of Li, Na, and K. We have also performed molecular dynamics simulations on the M2H2-NH3 system and succeeded to reproduce the H2 desorption from the reaction of Na2H2 with NH3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]