Prediction of novel high-pressure H 2 O -NaCl and carbon oxide compounds with a symmetry-driven structure search algorithm
Crystal structure prediction with theoretical methods is particularly challenging when unit cells with many atoms need to be considered. Here we employ a symmetry-driven structure search (SYDSS) method and combine it with density functional theory (DFT) to predict novel crystal structures at high pressure. We sample randomly from all 1,506 Wyckoff positions of the 230 space groups to generate a set of initial structures. During the subsequent structural relaxation with DFT, existing symmetries are preserved, but the symmetries and the space group may change as atoms move to more symmetric positions. By construction, our algorithm generates symmetric structures with high probability without excluding any configurations. This improves the search efficiency, especially for large cells with 20 atoms or more. We apply our SYDSS algorithm to identify stoichiometric (H 2 O) n -(NaCl) m and C n O m compounds at high pressure. We predict a novel H 2 O-NaCl structure with Pnma symmetry to form at 3.4 Mbar, which is within the range of diamond anvil experiments. In addition, we predict a novel C 2 O structure at 19.8 Mbar and C4O structure at 44.0 Mbar with Pbca and C2/m symmetry respectively.