FourPhonon: A four-phonon extension module for ShengBTE

Post date: Apr 14, 2021

FourPhonon, an extension module to ShengBTE, has been released and is free to download from its GitHub repository: FourPhonon. The developers are Zherui Han (Purdue University), Xiaolong Yang (Shenzhen University), Wu Li (Shenzhen University), Tianli Feng (University of Utah) and Xiulin Ruan (Purdue University).

From the authors:

FourPhonon is a computational package that can calculate four-phonon scattering rates in crystals. It is built within the ShengBTE framework. An adaptive energy broadening scheme is implemented for the calculation of four-phonon scattering rates. In analogy with thirdorder.py in ShengBTE, we also provide a separate python script, Fourthorder.py, to calculate fourth-order interatomic force-constants. The extension module preserves all the features of the well-recognized lattice thermal conductivity solver ShengBTE, including parallelism and straightforward workflow. A detailed description of this program and its underlying formalism can be found in this arXiv preprint: FourPhonon: An extension module to ShengBTE for computing four-phonon scattering rates and thermal conductivity. We wish that this program can help researchers explore the four-phonon effects.