Development of molecular dynamics methodology for simulations of hard materials

This thesis is focused on molecular dynamics simulations, both classical and ab initio. It is devoted to development of new methods and applications of molecular dynamics based techniques to a series of materials, all of which have the common property of being hard. I first study grain boundaries in diamond and apply a novel method to better explore the configurational phase space. Using this method several new grain boundary structures are found. The lowest energy grain boundary structure has 20% lower energy then the one obtained with a conventional approach. Another area is the development of efficient methods for first principles Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics. Here a fundamental shortcoming of the method that limits efficiency and introduces drift in the total energy of the system, is addressed and a solution to the problem is presented. Special attention is directed towards methods based on plane waves. The new molecular dynamics simulation method is shown to be more efficient and conserves the total energy orders of magnitude better then previous methods. The calculation of properties for paramagnetic materials at elevated temperature is a complex task. Here a new method is presented that combines the disordered local moments model and ab initio molecular dynamics. The method is applied to calculate the equation of state for CrN were the connection between magnetic state and atomic structure is very strong. The bulk modulus is found to be very similar for the paramagnetic cubic and the antiferromagnetic orthorhombic phase. TiN has many applications as a hard material. The effects of temperature on the elastic constants of TiN are studied using ab initio molecular dynamics. A significant dependence on temperature is seen for all elastic constants, which decrease linearly with temperature.