Pressure-Temperature Phase Diagram of Lithium, Predicted by Embedded Atom Model Potentials

J Dorrell and LB Partay, JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY B, 124, 6015-6023 (2020).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.0c03882

In order to study the performance of interatomic potentials and their reliability at higher pressures, the phase diagrams of two different embedded-atom-type potential models (EAMs) and a modified embedded-atom model (MEAM) of lithium are compared. The calculations were performed by using the nested sampling technique in the pressure range 0.01-20 GPa, in order to determine the liquid-vapor critical point, the melting curve, and the different stable solid phases of the compared models. The low-pressure stable structure below the melting line is found to be the body-centered-cubic (bcc) structure in all cases, but the higher pressure phases and the ground-state structures show a great variation, being face-centered cubic (fcc), hexagonal close-packed (hcp), a range of different close-packed stacking variants, and highly symmetric open structures are observed as well. A notable behavior of the EAM of Nichol and Ackland (Phys. Rev. B: Condens. Matter Mater. Phys. 2016, 93, 184101) is observed, that the model displays a maximum temperature in the melting line, similarly to experimental results.

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