Phase diagram of boron carbide with variable carbon composition

Abstract

Boron carbide exhibits intrinsic substitutional disorder over a broad composition range. The structure consists of 12-atom icosahedra placed at the vertices of a rhombohedral lattice, together with a 3-atom chain along the 3-fold axis. In the high carbon limit, one or two carbons can replace borons on the icosahedra while the chains are primarily of type C-B-C. We fit an interatomic pair interaction model to density functional theory total energies to investigate the substitutional carbon disorder. Monte Carlo simulations with sampling improved by replica exchange and augmented by 2d multiple histogram analysis, predicts three phases. The low temperature, high carbon composition monoclinic Cm "tilted polar" structure disorders through a pair of phase transitions, first via an Ising-like transition to a "bipolar" state with space group C2/m, then via a first order 3-state Potts-like transition to the experimentally observed "nonpolar" \bar{R}3m symmetry.