THERMAL-EXPANSION AND 3RD-ORDER ELASTIC-CONSTANTS OF FCC METALS

In this paper we develop the necessary expressions to evaluate third order elastic constants and temperature dependence of the thermal expansion of FCC metals. For this we use a previously proposed interatomic potential that can be expressed as a sum of two and three body force independent contributions. The very low temperature limit of the thermal expansion is also calculated using the continuum model. To do all the numerical calculations we write several FORTRAN programs. The necessary subroutines are grouped in several modules to allow maximum portability. We illustrate the usefulness of the programs by their application to gold.