Hello,
I am trying to calculate the energy of formation for a set of perovskites. I have calculated the total energy for each compound, and I understand that I need to now calculate the energies of the constituents in their standard phases, following dH
formation = E
tot - SUM(x*E
tot,i), for each element i appearing x times in the composition.
These would typically be the chemical potentials of the elements in standard states, such as in the OQMD (or so I thought):
--> Elemental ground-state structures and chemical potentials predicted by DFT at 0 K
-->
https://www.nature.com/articles/npjcompumats201510#t1However the total energies output by ATK are very large (~20,000 eV for 20 atoms), and therefore do not give the correct results for dH. Following the tutorial on the subject (
https://docs.quantumwise.com/tutorials/formation_energies/formation_energies.html), I see that for GaAs for example, one needs to calculate the bulk Ga and bulk As total energies. I therefore have 2 questions:
1. If the lowest energy phase should be chosen as the reference state, why can't the potentials in the above link be used? (i.e. why is the output so different than these values derived from VASP - I suspect this is about the PAW approach vs. GGA-PBE I am using).
2. How are the reference states to be chosen? I can download several different cif files of Ga and As phases from Crystallography Open DB. What reference states are actually used to get this number in the tutorial? (I have read the pointed to reference, and they also do not explicitly say how they calculate these numbers.)
It seems that the standard phases for all constituents must be calculated in the same ATK environment to keep the same DFT parameters (rather than compared with external values), and if this is true, I need to understand how to choose the correct phase. Thank you for the help!