Ab Initio Green-Kubo Approach for the Thermal Conductivity of Solids

We herein present a first-principles formulation of the Green-Kubo method that allows the accurate assessment of the phonon thermal conductivity of solid semiconductors and insulators in equilibrium ab initio molecular dynamics calculations. Using the virial for the nuclei, we propose a unique ab initio definition of the heat flux. Accurate size and time convergence are achieved within moderate computational effort by a robust, asymptotically exact extrapolation scheme. We demonstrate the capabilities of the technique by investigating the thermal conductivity of extreme high and low heat conducting materials, namely, Si (diamond structure) and tetragonal ZrO2.