Transferability of interatomic potentials for molybdenum and silicon

Y Lysogorskiy and T Hammerschmidt and J Janssen and J Neugebauer and R Drautz, MODELLING AND SIMULATION IN MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, 27, 025007 (2019).

DOI: 10.1088/1361-651X/aafd13

Interatomic potentials are widely used in computational materials science, in particular for simulations that are too computationally expensive for density functional theory (DFT). Most interatomic potentials have a limited application range and often there is very limited information available regarding their performance for specific simulations. We carried out high-throughput calculations for molybdenum and silicon with DFT and a number of interatomic potentials. We compare the DFT reference calculations and experimental data to the predictions of the interatomic potentials. We focus on a large number of basic materials properties, including the cohesive energy, atomic volume, elastic coefficients, vibrational properties, thermodynamic properties, surface energies and vacancy formation energies, which enables a detailed discussion of the performance of the different potentials. We further analyze correlations between properties as obtained from DFT calculations and how interatomic potentials reproduce these correlations, and suggest a general measure for quantifying the accuracy and transferability of an interatomic potential. From our analysis we do not establish a clearcut ranking of the potentials as each potential has its strengths and weaknesses. It is therefore essential to assess the properties of a potential carefully before application of the potential in a specific simulation. The data presented here will be useful for selecting a potential for simulations of Mo or Si.

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