Polymorphs of Titanium Dioxide: An Assessment of the Variants of Projector Augmented Wave Potential of Titanium on...

Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is one of the important functional materials owing to its diverse applications in many fields of chemistry, physics, nanoscience, and technology. Hundreds of studies on its physicochemical properties, including its various phases, have been reported experimentally and theoretically, but the controversial nature of relative dielectric permittivity of TiO₂ is yet to be understood. Toward this end, this study was undertaken to rationalize the effects of three commonly used projector augmented wave (PAW) potentials on the lattice geometries, phonon vibrations, and dielectric constants of rutile (R-)TiO₂ and four of its other phases (anatase, brookite, pyrite, and fluorite). Density functional theory calculations within the PBE and PBEsol levels, as well as their reinforced versions PBE+U and PBEsol+U (U = 3.0 eV), were performed. It was found that PBEsol in combination with the standard PAW potential centered on Ti is adequate to reproduce the experimental lattice parameters, optical phonon modes, and the ionic and electronic contributions of the relative dielectric permittivity of R-TiO₂ and four other phases. The origin of failure of the two soft potentials, namely, Ti_pv and Ti_sv, in predicting the correct nature of low-frequency optical phonon modes and ion-clamped dielectric constant of R-TiO₂ is discussed. It is shown that the hybrid functionals (HSEsol and HSE06) slightly improve the accuracy of the above characteristics at the cost of a significant increase in computation time. Finally, we have highlighted the influence of external hydrostatic pressure on the R-TiO₂ lattice, leading to the manifestation of ferroelectric modes that play a role in the determination of large and strongly pressure-dependent dielectric constant.