Abstract: We demonstrate that the melting points and other thermodynamic quantities of the alkali metals can be calculated based on static crystalline properties. To do this we derive analytic interatomic potentials for the alkali metals fitted precisely to cohesive and vacancy energies, elastic moduli, the lattice parameter, and crystal stability. These potentials are then used to calculate melting points by simulating the equilibration of solid and liquid samples in thermal contact at ambient pressure. With the exception of lithium, remarkably good agreement is found with experimental values. The instability of the bcc structure in Li and Na at low temperatures is also reproduced and, unusually, is not due to a soft T1N phonon mode. No forces or finite-temperature properties are included in the fit, so this demonstrates a surprisingly high level of intrinsic transferability in the simple potentials. Currently, there are few potentials available for the alkali metals, so in addition to demonstrating trends in behavior, we expect that the potentials will be of broad general use.

Abstract: The Morse parameters were calculated using experimental values for the energy of vaporization, the lattice constant, and the compressibility. The equation of state and the elastic constants which were computed using the Morse parameters, agreed with experiment for both face-centered and body-centered cubic metals. All stability conditions were also satisfied for both the face-centered and the body-centered metals. This shows that the Morse function can be applied validly to problems involving any type of deformation of the cubic metals.

Abstract: Ionic compounds exhibit a variety of crystal structures that can critically affect their applications. Traditionally, relative sizes of cations and anions have been used to explain coordination of ions within the crystals. Such approaches assume atoms to be hard spheres and they cannot explain the observed structures of some crystals. Here we develop an atomistic method and use it to explore the structure-determining factors beyond the limitations of the hard sphere approach. Our approach is based upon a calibrated interatomic potential database that uses independent intrinsic bond lengths to measure atomic sizes. By carrying out extensive atomistic simulations, striking relationships among intrinsic bond lengths are discovered to determine the B1 (NaCl), B2 (CsCl), and B3 (zinc-blende) structure of binary ionic compounds.

Abstract: Unraveling the liquid structure of multicomponent molten salts is challenging due to the difficulty in conducting and interpreting high-temperature diffraction experiments. Motivated by this challenge, we developed composition-transferable Gaussian approximation potential (GAP) for molten LiCl-KCl. A DFT-SCAN accurate GAP is active-learned from only ~1100 training configurations drawn from 10 unique mixture compositions enriched with metadynamics. The GAP-computed structures show strong agreement across high-energy x-ray diffraction experiments, including for a eutectic not explicitly included in model training, thereby opening the possibility of composition discovery.

Abstract: Achieving atomic-level understanding of crystallization of molten salts is of importance to a wide range of technological applications. Recent work [Fan et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 122, e2425702122 (2025)] revealed that crystal nucleation in molten LiF salt is a multistage process according to the molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations based on an atomic cluster expansion (ACE) machine-learning interatomic potential (MLIP). In order to understand the influence of increasing cation size on nucleation pathways and nucleation rates of molten fluoride salts, here we develop two new ACE MLIPs for NaF and KF. The two ACE MLIPs feature DFT-SCAN-level accuracy for liquid and multiple solid polymorphs over a wide temperature (0–2000 K) and pressure (0-100 GPa) range, and also reproduce well a number of experimental data for solid and liquid equilibrium properties. The efficiency of the two ACE MLIPs enable million-atom-scale or microsecond-scale MD simulations. The two general-purpose ACE MLIPs are expected to be useful for atomistic simulations for different purposes, in addition to studying crystallization of molten NaF and KF salts.