Wasim Raja Mondal

We report the development and application of a new method for carrying out computational investigations of the effects of mass and force-constant (FC) disorder on phonon spectra. The method is based on the recently developed typical medium dynamical cluster approach (TMDCA), which is a Green's function approach. Excellent quantitative agreement with previous exact diagonalization results establishes the veracity of the method. Application of the method to a model system of binary mass and FC-disordered system leads to several findings. A narrow resonance, significantly below the van Hove singularity, that has been termed as the boson peak, is seen to emerge for low soft particle concentrations. We show, using the typical phonon spectrum, that the states constituting the boson peak cross over from being completely localized to being extended as a function of increasing soft particle concentration. In general, an interplay of mass and FC disorder is found to be cooperative in nature, enhancing phonon localization over all frequencies. However, for certain range of frequencies, and depending on material parameters, FC disorder can delocalize the states that were localized by mass disorder, and vice-versa. Modeling vacancies as weakly bonded sites with vanishing mass, we find that vacancies, even at very low concentrations, are extremely effective in localizing phonons. Thus, inducing vacancies is proposed as a promising route for efficient thermoelectrics. Finally, we use model parameters corresponding to the alloy system, Ni1-xPtx, and show that mass disorder alone is insufficient to explain the pseudogap in the phonon spectrum; the concomitant presence of FC disorder is necessary.

The effect of disorder on lattice vibrational modes has been a topic of interest for several decades. In this work, we employ a Green's function based approach, namely the dynamical cluster approximation (DCA), to investigate phonons in mass disordered systems. Detailed benchmarks with previous exact calculations are used to validate the method in a wide parameter space. An extension of the method, namely the typical medium DCA (TMDCA), is used to study Anderson localization of phonons in three dimensions. We show that, for binary isotopic disorder, lighter impurities induce localized modes beyond the bandwidth of the host system, while heavier impurities lead to a partial localization of the low-frequency acoustic modes. For a uniform (box) distribution of masses, the physical spectrum is shown to develop long tails comprising mostly localized modes. The mobility edge separating extended and localized modes, obtained through the TMDCA, agrees well with results from the transfer matrix method. A re-entrance behavior of the mobility edge with increasing disorder is found that is similar to, but somewhat more pronounced than, the behavior in disordered electronic systems. Our work establishes a new computational approach, which recovers the thermodynamic limit, is versatile and computationally inexpensive, to investigate lattice vibrations in disordered lattice systems.

The effect of disorder on lattice vibrational modes has been a topic of interest for several decades. In this work, we employ a Green's function based approach, namely, the dynamical cluster approximation (DCA), to investigate phonons in mass-disordered systems. Detailed benchmarks with previous exact calculations are used to validate the method in a wide parameter space. An extension of the method, namely, the typical medium DCA (TMDCA), is used to study Anderson localization of phonons in three dimensions. We show that, for binary isotopic disorder, lighter impurities induce localized modes beyond the bandwidth of the host system, while heavier impurities lead to a partial localization of the low-frequency acoustic modes. For a uniform (box) distribution of masses, the physical spectrum is shown to develop long tails comprising mostly localized modes. The mobility edge separating extended and localized modes, obtained through the TMDCA, agrees well with results from the transfer matrix method. A reentrance behavior of the mobility edge with increasing disorder is found that is similar to, but somewhat more pronounced than, the behavior in disordered electronic systems. Our work establishes a computational approach, which recovers the thermodynamic limit, is versatile and computationally inexpensive, to investigate lattice vibrations in disordered lattice systems.

Perturbative schemes utilizing a spectral moment expansion are well known and extensively used for investigating the physics of model Hamiltonians and real material systems. The advantages they offer, in terms of being computationally inexpensive, with real frequency output at zero and finite temperatures, compensate for their deficiencies and offer a quick, qualitative analysis of the system behavior. In this work, we have developed a method, that can be classified as a multi-orbital iterative perturbation theory (MO-IPT) to study N-fold degenerate and non degenerate Anderson impurity models. As applications of the solver, we have combined the method with dynamical mean field theory to explore lattice models like the single orbital Hubbard model, covalent band insulator and the multi-orbital Hubbard model for density-density type interactions in different parameter regimes. The Hund's coupling effects in case of multiple orbitals is also studied. The limitations and quality of results are gauged through extensive comparison with data from the numerically exact continuous time quantum Monte Carlo method (hybridization expansion CTQMC). In general we observe that the agreement with CTQMC results gets better as we move away from particle-hole symmetry. We have integrated MO-IPT with density functional theory based electronic structure methods to study real material systems. As a test case, we have studied the classic, strongly correlated electronic material, SrVO$_3$. A comparison of density of states and photo emission spectrum (PES) with results obtained from different impurity solvers and experiments yields good agreement.