Chuck-Hou Yee edited tuning.tex  almost 8 years ago

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With modern materials databases, we are able to reanalyze the entire La-Cu-S-O system to construct the convex hull (plotted in Fig. 1) and globally investigate stability. Notice that La2CuS2O2 and La2CuSO3 are not among the stable compounds on the hull.  Using the convex hull, we can assess the stability of the reactants and products reported in experiment. In Fig. 2, we plot the energies relative to the convex hull for all reported compounds. Negative values are stability energies against decomposition. We find that La2CuS2O2 and La2CuSO3 are highly unstable at nearly 500meV/atom above the hull. Additionally, LaCuSO is marginally unstable at 23meV/atom above the hull, but this is indistinguishable from zero given the error bars of the current method. In hindsight, we could have predicted that the proposed compounds would not have formed and instead have decomposed into:  \begin{equation} \begin{align*}  \text{La}_2\text{CuS}_2\text{O}_2 \rightarrow &\rightarrow  \text{La}_2\text{SO}_2 + \text{CuS}\end{equation}  4 La2CuSO3 => \text{La}_2\text{CuS}\text{O}_3 &\rightarrow  3 La2SO2 \text{La}_2\text{SO}_2  + 4 Cu 4\text{Cu}  + La2SO6 \text{La}_2\text{SO}_6  \end{align*}  We also investigate the sensitivity of the stability energies to the LDA+U  correction (denoted $\Delta E_M$ in Eq. 6 of PRB 84, 045115 (2011)). Varying  $\Delta E_M$ from 0.75eV/atom to 0.65eV/atom shifts the stability energies by