An ab initio Study on the Structural and Bonding Properties of Li_2Si_3O_7

A theoretical study on the structural and electronic properties of Li2Si3O7 is performed by using density functional theory(DFT) method.The molecular structure of the crystal and two kinds of [SiO4]-tetrahedra with different number of non-bridging oxygen(Qn) are analyzed.The structure of crystal Li2Si3O7 can be considered as a framework of corner-sharing tetrahedra.From the band structure(BS),total density of state(TDOS) and projected density of state(PDOS) of the crystal,the structures of Q3,Q4,and LiO4 tetrahedra as well as their bonding characters are presented.For lithium trisilicate,we find the bond cation-NBO(nonbridging oxygen and oxygen atoms bonding to one silicon atom only) is stronger than the bond cation-BO(bridging oxygen and oxygen atoms bonding to two silicon atoms).By analyzing the ionicity of two different types of bonds of silicon-oxygen according to the Mulliken population analysis,we also find that the Si-NBO bonds have higher ionicity than Si-BO for crystalline lithium trisilicate,which agrees with other lithium silicates.