Pressure-induced structural phase transitions of zirconium: an ab initio study based on statistical ensemble theory

Abstract

Recently, we put forward a direct integral approach to solve the partition function with ultrahigh efficiency and precision, which enables the rigorous ensemble theory to investigate phase behaviors of realistic condensed matters and has been successfully applied to the phase transition of vanadium metal (Ning et al 2022 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 34 425404). In this work, the approach is applied to the structural phase transitions of zirconium metal under compressions up to 160 GPa and ultrahigh calculation precision is achieved. For the obtained equation of state with pressure over 40 GPa, the deviations from latest experiments are within and the computed transition pressure of is 6.93 GPa, which is about five times larger than previous theoretical predictions and in excellent agreement with the measured range of 5–15 GPa. Our results support the argument that there is no existence of the isostructural phase transition of Zr metal that was asserted by recent experimental observations.