PNNL

Abstract

To ab initio simulate an ionic crystal using a cluster of atoms, one must surround that cluster with point charges. These point charges add the effect of the electrostatic potential of the rest of the crystal on the electronic structure of the quantum cluster. The value of the point charges has to be chosen to reproduce the crystal field in the region of the cluster. In this work, a method to compute the necessary point charges is presented. The algorithm to choose the point charges is an extension of the one presented by Derenzo et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 2000, 112, 2074]. The method consists of a self-consistent loop, fitting in each iteration the value of the point charges to reproduce the electrostatic field, calculated from the quantum simulation, in the region of the cluster. This method was then applied to the study of the (001) basal surface of hematite, R-Fe2O3. As the cluster size is systematically increased, it is shown that to fully converge the electrostatic effect on the electronic structure of the cluster, clusters of the order of 60 atoms are necessary. As a convergence parameter for the cluster to the bulk behavior, we used the ionization energy of the cluster. In the limit of an infinite cluster, we obtained the work function of hematite to be 5.6 eV.