Mechanism of densification in silica glass under pressure as revealed by a bottom-up pairwise effective interaction model

A new short-range pairwise numerical potential for silica is presented. The potential is derived from a single ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulation of molten silica using the force-matching method with the forces being represented numerically by piecewise functions (splines). The AIMD simulation is performed using the Born-Oppenheimer method with the generalized gradient approximation (BLYP) for the XC energy functional. The new effective potential includes a soft-repulsive shoulder to describe the interactions of oxygen ions at short separations. The new potential, despite being short-ranged and derived from single-phase data, exhibits a good transferability to silica crystalline polymorphs and amorphous silica. The importance of the O-O soft-repulsive shoulder interaction on glass densification under cold and shock compressions is assessed from MD simulations of silica glass under room and shock Hugoniot conditions, respectively. Results from these simulations indicate that the appearance of oxygen complexes (primarily pairs) interacting through soft-repulsive shoulder potential occurs at 8-10 GPa, and under cold compression conditions becomes notable at 40 GPa, essentially coinciding with the transition to a Si sixfold coordination state. An analysis of changes in system structure in compressed and shocked states reveals that the O ions interacting through the soft-repulsive shoulder potential in denser states of silica glass may create a mechanical multi-stability under elevated pressures and thus to contribute to the observed anomalous densification. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3696865]