Non-equilibrium properties of GaAs interatomic potentials

Ion irradiation can lead to local melting and other large distortions in a material. Thus, it is very important that computer simulation models of irradiation phenomena can describe melting and structure changes well. In the present paper we examine how GaAs interatomic potentials, which have been used to describe irradiation phenomena in the literature, behave on melting. We show that the most commonly used GaAs potential [M. Sayed et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. Phys. Res. B 102 (1995) 232] does not have the correct ground state structure, making it unsuitable for describing ion irradiation processes