• Journal of the Korean Physical Society
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• v.73 no.9
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• pp.1315-1323
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• 2018

The classical-fluids density functional theory has been developed for studying the structural and the electrical properties of electrolyte solutions containing uniformly charged hard-spherical ions. The modified fundamental-measure theory has been used to evaluate the hard-sphere contribution. The mean-field approximation has been employed to calculate the cross correlation between the hard sphere contribution and the Coulomb interaction. The Poisson equation for ions carrying charges that are spatially separated has been solved. The present theory shows reasonably good agreement with the corresponding Monte Carlo simulation results. The calculated results show that the attraction between like-charged planar surfaces is the result of the intra-ionic correlation and depends strongly on the ion size, valence, mole fraction, and charge distribution of electrolytes.

• Journal of the Mineralogical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2018

Aluminum silicates ($Al_2SiO_5$) undergo phase transitions among kyanite, andalusite, and sillimanite depending on temperature and pressure conditions. The minerals are often used as an important indicator of the degree of metamorphism for certain metamorphic rocks. In this study, we have applied classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and density functional theory (DFT) to the aluminum silicates. We examined the crystal structures as a function of applied pressure and the corresponding stabilities based on calculated enthalpies at each pressure. In terms of the lattice parameters, both methods showed that the volume decreases as the pressure increases as observed in the experiment. In particular, DFT results differed from experimental results by much less than 1%. As to the relative stability, however, both methods showed different levels of accuracy. In the MD simulations, a transition pressure at which the relative stability between two minerals reverse could not be determined because the enthalpies were insensitive to the applied pressure. On the other hand, in DFT calculations, the relative stability relation among the three minerals was consistent with experiment, although the transition pressure was strongly dependent on the choice of the electronic exchange-correlation functional.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.425.1-425.1
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• 2014

Thermal transport in nanomaterials is not only scientifically interesting but also technological important for various future electronic, bio, and energy device applications. Among the various computation approaches to investigate lattice thermal transport phenomena in nanoscale, the atomistic nonequilibrium Green's function approach based on first-principles density functional theory calculations appeared as a promising method given the continued miniaturization of devices and the difficulty of developing classical force constants for novel nanoscale interfaces. Among the nanometerials, carbon atomic chains, namely the cumulene (all-doulble bonds, ${\cdots}C=C=C=C{\cdots}$) and polyyne (alternation of single and triple bonds, ${\cdots}C{\equiv}C-C{\equiv}C{\cdots}$) can be considered as the extream cases of interconnction materials for nanodevices. After the discovery and realization of carbon atomic chains, their electronic transport properties have been widely studied. For the thermal transport properties, however, there have been few literatures for this simple linear chain system. In this work, we first report on the development of a non-equilibrium Green's function theory-based computational tool for atomistic thermal transport calculations of nanojunctions. Using the developed tool, we investigated phonon dispersion and transmission properties of polyethylene (${\cdots}CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2{\cdots}$) and polyene (${\cdots}CH-CH-CH-CH{\cdots}$) structures as well as the cumulene and polyyne. The resulting phonon dispersion from polyethylene and polyene showed agreement with previous results. Compared to the cumulene, the gap was found near the ${\Gamma}$ point of the phonon dispersion of polyyne as the prediction of Peierls distortion, and this feature was reflected in the phonon transmission of polyyne. We also investigated the range of interatomic force interactions with increase in the size of the simulation system to check the convergence criteria. Compared to polyethylene and polyene, polyyne and cumulene showed spatially long-ranged force interactions. This is reflected on the differences in phonon transport caused by the delicate differences in electronic structure.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.105-109
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• 2017

The effect of temperature and vanadium metal concentration on the electronic and thermoelectric properties of Si in the diamond cubic structure has been investigated using a combination of density functional theory simulations and the semi classical Boltzmann's theory. The BotzTrap code within the constant relaxation time approximation has been used to obtain the Seebeck coefficient and other transport properties of interest for alloys of the structure $Si_{1-x}V_x$, where x is 0, 0.125, 0.25, 0.375, and 0.5. The thermoelectric properties have been extracted for a temperature range of 300 K to 1,000 K. The general trend with V atom substitution for Si causes the Seeback coefficient to increase and the thermal conductivity to decrease for the various alloys. The optimum values are for $Si_5V_3$ and $Si_4V_4$ alloys for charge carrier concentrations of $10^{21}cm^{-3}$ in the mid temperature range of 500~800 K. This is a very desirable effect for a promising thermoelectric and the figure of merit ZT approaches 0.2 at 600 K for the p-type $Si_5V_3$ alloy.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.187-202
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• 2017

The classical electron band theory is a powerful tool to describe the electronic structures of solids. However, the band theory and corresponding density functional theory become inappropriate if a system comprises localized electrons in a scenario wherein strong electron correlations cannot be neglected. $SrRuO_3$ is one such system, and the partially localized d-band electrons exhibit some interesting behaviors such as enhanced effective mass, spectral incoherency, and oppression of ferromagnetism and itinerancy. In particular, a Metal-Insulator transition occurs when the thickness of $SrRuO_3$ approaches approximately four unit cells. In the computational studies, irrespective of the inclusion of on-site Hubbard repulsion and Hund's coupling parameters, correctly depicting the correlation effects is difficult. Because the oxygen atoms and the symmetry of octahedra are known to play important roles in the system, scrutinizing both the electronic band structure and the lattice system of $SrRuO_3$ is required to find the origin of the correlated behaviors. Transmission electron microscopy is a promising solution to this problem because of its integrated functionalities, which include atomic-resolution imaging and electron energy loss spectroscopy.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.33 no.11
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• pp.3719-3726
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• 2012

Formation of Z-DNA, a left-handed double helix, from B-DNA, the canonical right-handed double helix, occurs during important biological processes such as gene expression and DNA transcription. Such B-Z transitions can also be induced by high salt concentration in vitro, but the changes in the relative stability of B-DNA and Z-DNA with salt concentration have not been fully explained despite numerous attempts. For example, electrostatic effects alone could not account for salt-induced B-Z transitions in previous studies. In this paper, we propose that the B-Z transition can be explained if counterion entropy is considered along with the electrostatic interactions. This can be achieved by conducting all-atom, explicit-solvent MD simulations followed by MM-PBSA and molecular DFT calculations. Our MD simulations show that counterions tend to bind at specific sites in B-DNA and Z-DNA, and that more ions cluster near Z-DNA than near B-DNA. Moreover, the difference in counterion ordering near B-DNA and Z-DNA is larger at a low salt concentration than at a high concentration. The results imply that the exclusion of counterions by Z-DNA-binding proteins may facilitate Z-DNA formation under physiological conditions.