Influence of the interatomic potentials on molecular dynamics simulations of displacement cascades

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a powerful tool to study the displacement cascades initiated by the neutrons when they interact with matter. Key components of this technique are the interatomic potentials which model the binding of the different constitutive atoms. There exist many interatomic potentials dedicated to alpha-Fe and we have tested three of them for the study of radiation damage. We have found that the primary damage is potential sensitive. From our study, it appears that some characteristics of the potentials, not always considered, can be correlated to the type of damage produced by displacement cascades. The repulsive part of the potential has a strong influence on the cascade morphology. Moreover, equilibrium properties such as the atoms mean square displacements, the vacancy migration and vacancy-vacancy binding energies also appear to have some influence and should be investigated carefully when simulating radiation damage. It is therefore very important to use extreme care when trying to obtain quantitative results from MD simulations. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.