Macroscopic and Microscopic Structures of Cesium Lead Iodide Perovskite from Atomistic Simulations

Abstract

A first‐principles‐based effective Hamiltonian is developed and employed to investigate finite‐temperature structural properties of a prototype of perovskite halides, that is CsPbI3. Such simulations, when using first‐principles‐extracted coefficients, successfully reproduce the existence of an orthorhombic Pnma state and its iodine octahedral tilting angles around room temperature. However, they also yield a direct transformation from Pnma to cubic upon heating, unlike measurements that reported the occurrence of an intermediate long‐range‐tilted tetragonal P4/mbm phase in‐between the orthorhombic and cubic phases. Such disagreement, which may cast some doubts about the extent to which first‐principle methods can be trusted to mimic hybrid perovskites, can be resolved by “only” changing one short‐range tilting parameter in the whole set of effective Hamiltonian coefficients. In such a case, some reasonable values of this specific parameter result in the predictions that i) the intermediate P4/mbm state originates from fluctuations over many different tilted states; and ii) the cubic phase is highly locally distorted and develops strong transverse antiphase correlation between first‐nearest neighbor iodine octahedral tiltings, before undergoing a phase transition to P4/mbm under cooling.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 08, 2020
Source ID
10.1002/adfm.201909496

Entities

People

  • Bin Xu
  • Lan Chen
  • Laurent Bellaiche
  • Yurong Yang

Organizations

  • Army Research Office
  • Nanjing University
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • Soochow University
  • University of Arkansas

Tags

Readers

  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.
  • Organic Chemistry
  • Quantum spin resonance or Electron Paramagnetic Resonance spectroscopy.