First Principles Pseudopotential Calculations on Aluminum and Aluminum Alloys

Abstract

Recent advances in computational techniques have led to the possibility of performing first principles calculations of the energetics of alloy formation on systems involving several hundred atoms. This includes impurity concentrations in the 1%range as well as realistic models of disordered materials (including liquids), vacancies, and grain botmdaries. The new techniques involve the use of soft, fully nordocal pseudopotentials. iterative diagonalization, and parallel computing algorithms. This approach has been pioneered by Car and Parrinello. Here we give a review of recent results using parallel and serial algorithms by our group on metallic systems including liquid aluminum and liquid sodium, and also new results on vacancies in aluminum and on aluminummagnesium alloys.