Tight-binding study of stacking fault energies and the Rice criterion of ductility in the fcc metals

We have used the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) tight-binding (TB) method to calculate the generalized stacking fault energy and the Rice ductility criterion in the fee metals Al, Cu, Rh, Pd, Ag, Ir, Pt, Au, and Pb. The method works well for all classes of metals, i.e., simple metals, noble metals, and transition metals. We compared our results with full potential linear-muffin-tin orbital and embedded atom method (EAM) calculations, as well as experiment, and found good agreement. This is impressive, since the NRL-TB approach only fits to first-principles full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave equations of state and band structures for cubic systems. Comparable accuracy with EAM potentials can be achieved only by fitting to the stacking fault energy.