Impact of Short-Range Forces on Defect Production from High-Energy Collisions.

Primary radiation damage formation in solid materials typically involves collisions between atoms that have up to a few hundred keV of kinetic energy. During these collisions, the distance between two colliding atoms can approach 0.05 nm. At such small atomic separations, force fields fitted to equilibrium properties tend to significantly underestimate the potential energy of the colliding dimer. To enable molecular dynamics simulations of high-energy collisions, it is common practice to use a screened Coulomb force field to describe the interactions and to smoothly join this to the equilibrium force field at a suitable interatomic spacing. However, there is no accepted standard method for choosing the parameters used in the joining process, and our results prove that defect production is sensitive to how the force fields are linked. A new procedure is presented that involves the use of ab initio calculations to determine the magnitude and spatial dependence of the pair interactions at intermediate distances, along with systematic criteria for choosing the joining parameters. Results are presented for the case of nickel, which demonstrate the use and validity of the procedure.

First-principles study of point defects at a semicoherent interface.

Most of the atomistic modeling of semicoherent metal-metal interfaces has so far been based on the use of semiempirical interatomic potentials. We show that key conclusions drawn from previous studies are in contradiction with more precise ab-initio calculations. In particular we find that single point defects do not delocalize, but remain compact near the interfacial plane in Cu-Nb multilayers. We give a simple qualitative explanation for this difference on the basis of the well known limited transferability of empirical potentials.

Miniature crystal models of cellulose polymorphs and other carbohydrates.

Miniature crystal models of cellulose and other carbohydrates were evaluated with the molecular mechanics program MM3. The models consisted of groups of 24 to 32 monosaccharide residues, with the models of mono- and disaccharides based on well-established, single-crystal work. Structures of the cellulose forms and cellotetraose were based on published work using fibre diffraction methods. A structure for the single-chain I alpha cellulose unit cell was also tested. A dielectric constant of about 4 was best for this type of work. Calculated intra- and intermolecular energy for glucose agreed with literature values for the heat of combustion. Cellulose II had the lowest calculated energy for a cellulose form, followed by I alpha, cellulose III(I), ramie I, IV(II) and IV(I). Optimization of cellulose IV caused larger mean atomic movements from the original crystallographic positions than the other cellulose forms, and cellotetraose had larger movements than any of the other structures. Lattice energies for the cellulose forms were about 20 kcal/mol of glucose residues, with a dominant van der Waals component.