High pressure equation of state for solid xenon from interatomic potentials

Abstract

The interatomic pair potential for xenon recently derived by Aziz and Slaman (AS) is used to calculate pressure as function of volume for solid xenon, and the results are compared with experimental data and with those calculated using the earlier potential of Barker, Klein and Bobetic (BKB). If the Axilrod-Teller (AT) interaction is included agreement with experiment is good up to 50 kbar for either potential but there are deviations at higher pressures, larger for the earlier potential. A pair potential which gives better agreement with high pressure solid state data at the expense of worse agreement with gas viscosities is described, and the respective roles of many-body interactions and uncertainties in the pair potential in explaining the discrepancies with experimental solid-state pressures are discussed. Published electronic calculations are shown to give remarkably good agreement with the high-pressure experimental data.