Accelerating first-principles molecular-dynamics thermal conductivity calculations for complex systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wieser, Sandro, Cen, YuJie, Madsen, Georg K. H., Carrete, Jesús
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wieser, Sandro
Cen, YuJie
Madsen, Georg K. H.
Carrete, Jesús
author_facet Wieser, Sandro
Cen, YuJie
Madsen, Georg K. H.
Carrete, Jesús
contents Atomistic simulations of heat transport in complex materials are costly and hard to converge. This has led to the development of several noise-reduction techniques applicable to equilibrium molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations. We analyze the performance of those strategies, taking InAs nanowires as our benchmark due to the diverse structures and complex phonon spectra of these quasi-1D systems. We demonstrate how, for low-thermal-conductivity systems, cepstral analysis can reduce computational demands while still delivering accurate results that do not require discarding arbitrary parts of the dataset. However, issues with this approach are revealed when treating high-thermal-conductivity systems, where the thermal conductivity is significantly underestimated. We discuss alternative methods to be used in that situation, relying on uncertainty propagation from independent simulations. We show that the contributions of the covariance matrix have to be included for a quantitative assessment of the error. The combination of these strategies with machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) provides an accelerated, robust workflow applicable to a diverse set of systems, as our examples using a highly transferable MACE potential illustrate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_08573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating first-principles molecular-dynamics thermal conductivity calculations for complex systems
Wieser, Sandro
Cen, YuJie
Madsen, Georg K. H.
Carrete, Jesús
Materials Science
Atomistic simulations of heat transport in complex materials are costly and hard to converge. This has led to the development of several noise-reduction techniques applicable to equilibrium molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations. We analyze the performance of those strategies, taking InAs nanowires as our benchmark due to the diverse structures and complex phonon spectra of these quasi-1D systems. We demonstrate how, for low-thermal-conductivity systems, cepstral analysis can reduce computational demands while still delivering accurate results that do not require discarding arbitrary parts of the dataset. However, issues with this approach are revealed when treating high-thermal-conductivity systems, where the thermal conductivity is significantly underestimated. We discuss alternative methods to be used in that situation, relying on uncertainty propagation from independent simulations. We show that the contributions of the covariance matrix have to be included for a quantitative assessment of the error. The combination of these strategies with machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) provides an accelerated, robust workflow applicable to a diverse set of systems, as our examples using a highly transferable MACE potential illustrate.
title Accelerating first-principles molecular-dynamics thermal conductivity calculations for complex systems
topic Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08573