AB-INITIO MOLECULAR DYNAMICS IN THE FULL-POTENTIAL LMTO METHOD: DERIVATION OF A PRACTICAL FORCE THEOREM

Abstract

A major advance in electronic structure calculations was the combination of local-density techniques with molecular dynamics by Car and Parrinello seven years ago. Unfortunately, application of the Car-Parrinello scheme has been limited essentially to sp materials because only in the plane-wave pseudopotential method forces are trivial to calculate. We present a systematic approach to derive force theorems with desired characteristics within complicated basis sets, which are applicable to all elements of the periodic table equally well. Application to the LMTO basis set yields an accurate force theorem, quite distinct from the Hellman-Feynman form, which is exceptionally insensitive to errors in the trial density. The forces were implemented in a new full-potential LMTO method which is suited to arbitrary geometries. First results for ab-initio molecular dynamics and simulated annealing runs are shown for some random small molecules and small clusters of silver atoms.