Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Using Genetic Algorithms To Map First-Principles Results To Model Hamiltonians: Application To The Generalized Ising Model For Alloys, Gus L. W. Hart, Volker Blum, Michael J. Walorski, Alex Zunger

Faculty Publications

The cluster expansion method provides a standard framework to map first-principles generated energies for a few selected configurations of a binary alloy onto a finite set of pair and many-body interactions between the alloyed elements. These interactions describe the energetics of all possible configurations of the same alloy, which can hence be readily used to identify ground state structures and, through statistical mechanics solutions, find finite-temperature properties. In practice, the biggest challenge is to identify the types of interactions which are most important for a given alloy out of the many possibilities. We describe a genetic algorithm which automates this …