Second-moment interatomic potential for gold and its application to molecular-dynamics simulations

We have obtained a new interatomic potential for Au in the framework of the second-moment approximation to the tight-binding model by fitting the total energy of the metal as a function of the volume computed by first-principles calculations. The scheme was validated by calculating the bulk modulus, elastic constants, vacancy formation energy and relaxed surface energies of Au, which were found to be in fair agreement with experiment. We also have performed molecular-dynamics simulations at various temperatures and we have determined the temperature dependence of the lattice constant, mean-square displacements, as well as the phonon density of states and the phonon dispersion curves of the metal. The agreement with the available experimental data is much better than previous works based on the same approximation