Ab initio study of the low-temperature phases of lithium imide

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We present a low-temperature structural model for lithium imide ͑Li 2 NH͒ that is consistent with experimental studies. Using the cluster expansion formalism and density-functional theory, we have identified a low-energy crystal structure for lithium imide with 96 atoms per unit cell. This low-energy structure is consistent with experimental diffraction patterns, and we propose that the symmetry of the structure may be increased at finite temperature due to thermal fluctuations. In addition, our results suggest that lithium motion is relatively facile between octahedral and tetrahedral sites, which may help explain how lithium diffuses through this material.