Force and heat current formulas for many-body potentials in molecular dynamics simulation with applications to thermal conductivity calculations

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openAccess

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2015

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

1-12

Series

PHYSICAL REVIEW B, Volume 92, issue 9

Abstract

We derive expressions of interatomic force and heat current for many-body potentials such as the Tersoff, the Brenner, and the Stillinger-Weber potential used extensively in molecular dynamics simulations of covalently bonded materials. Although these potentials have a many-body nature, a pairwise force expression that follows Newton's third law can be found without referring to any partition of the potential. Based on this force formula, a stress applicable for periodic systems can be unambiguously defined. The force formula can then be used to derive the heat current formulas using a natural potential partitioning. Our heat current formulation is found to be equivalent to most of the seemingly different heat current formulas used in the literature, but to deviate from the stress-based formula derived from two-body potential. We validate our formulation numerically on various systems described by the Tersoff potential, namely three-dimensional silicon and diamond, two-dimensional graphene, and quasi-one-dimensional carbon nanotube. The effects of cell size and production time used in the simulation are examined.

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molecular dynamics

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Citation

Fan, Z, Pereira, L F C, Wang, H-Q, Zheng, J-C, Donadio, D & Harju, A 2015, ' Force and heat current formulas for many-body potentials in molecular dynamics simulation with applications to thermal conductivity calculations ', Physical Review B, vol. 92, no. 9, 094301, pp. 1-12 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.094301