Abstract
A review is given of studies that have been made by the Sussex research group on two-body plus three-body potentials for elemental solids, surfaces and clusters. Parameters are fitted to properties of the bulk solid (cohesive energy, lattice spacing, phonon frequencies, elastic constants and vacancy formation energy), and the potentials have been shown to give sensible structures for clusters and, in the few cases examined, for surface energies and structures. The same functional form of the potential has been used for simple metals, transition metals and group 4 solids.