Development of interatomic potential suitable for molecular dynamics simulation of Ni oxidation and Ni–NiO interface

Large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations enabled by computationally efficient semiempirical potentials are an invaluable tool for materials modeling. In the case of metallic alloys, embedded atom method (EAM) and Finnis-Sinclair (FS) potentials are a reasonable choice based on their good balance of quality and computational cost. However, these semiempirical potentials are not suitable for simulating ionic systems, which prevents their use in studying many technologically relevant metal-oxide systems. The charge transfer ionic potential (CTIP), which can utilize EAM/FS potentials available in the literature together with a variable charge representation of electrostatic interactions, should be a reasonable choice for performing reliable and computationally efficient MD simulations of such systems. However, only a few such potentials are available in the literature, and their computational cost is much higher compared to EAM/FS potentials. In the present work, we have attempted to remedy these deficiencies by combining several modifications to the CTIP model proposed in the literature and efficiently implementing them into the widely used Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator MD code. Using these modifications, we have developed a new Ni-O CTIP parameterization, which has been tested in several different scenarios of interest. First, the early stages of Ni surface oxidation were simulated, demonstrating the nucleation and growth of a crystalline NiO film across the surface. Second, solidification and vitrification in the Ni-O system were investigated, demonstrating that the new CTIP parameterization provides reasonable agreement with the experimentally determined equilibrium phase diagram. Finally, we studied the interaction of dislocations in a Ni matrix with a NiO inclusion using a simulation cell with an unprecedented number of atoms for a variable charge MD simulation. Thus, the approach utilized in the present study is an efficient method to simulate large scale atomic mechanisms in metal-oxide systems.