Theory of static structural properties, crystal stability, and phase transformations: Application to Si and Ge

We demonstrate that not only the static structural properties but also the crystal stability and pressure-induced phase transformations in solids can be accurately described employing an ab initio pseudopotential method within the local-density-functional formalism. With the use of atomic numbers of constituent elements and a subset of crystal structures as the only input information, the calculated structural properties of Si and Ge are in excellent agreement with experiment.