Structures and properties of uranium–niobium intermetallic compounds under high pressure: A first principles study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metallic uranium-based alloys, with d-transition metals such as Nb, Mo, and Zr, are promising candidates for actinide fuel. For this purpose, their behaviors under changing physical stimuli need to be understood. Here, we systematically investigate U–Nb intermetallic compounds and predict new compound formations under different pressures using the first-principles swarm-intelligence structure searching method. Two new compounds (U1Nb6 and U2Nb1) were identified to be thermodynamically stable at ambient and high pressures. U1Nb6 has a triclinic symmetry that is stable in the pressure range of 0–200 GPa, while U2Nb1 has a hexagonal closely packed structure at low pressure and transforms to a simple hexagonal lattice at 20 GPa. Other compounds, particularly U-rich ones (U3Nb1, U4Nb1, U5Nb1, and U6Nb1), are found metastable at ambient and high pressures, and all have orthorhombic structures. The structural, vibrational, electronic, and mechanical properties of predicted U-rich compounds were thoroughly studied using density-functional theory. The results of phonon spectra and elastic constant show that the predicted new structures are dynamically and mechanically stable in the corresponding pressure range. Also, these newly identified U-rich compounds exhibit strong composition dependence, and the pressure-induced enhancements of structural stability and mechanical performances are evident. These findings shall enrich the understanding of U-based alloys and serve as meaningful predictions for experimental research in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".