Thermoelastic properties of random alloys from first-principles theory

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We present a first-principles description of the temperature-dependent elastic constants in random alloys. The substitutional disorder is treated using the coherent potential approximation implemented within the frameworks of exact muffin-tin orbitals theory. The temperature effects are approximated as the sum of electronic and thermal expansion contributions. Calculations on pure Nb demonstrate that this approach correctly accounts for the main temperature dependence of cubic elastic constants. When extended to Nb-Zr solid solution, the theoretical results show good agreement with experiments at temperatures 3000.3em0exK.