Advice needed on implementing a new pair potential

Hello,

I am trying to model a new pair potential in LAMMPS, but I am kind of facing a tricky situation. As far as I have seen, we require the pairwise force and energy expressions for calculations. Here I want to implement a potential which has an energy expression of the form:

E_i = a*sum(f(r_ij)) + b/sum(g(r_ij))

where E_i is the energy associated with the i’th atom and the sum() is over index of neighbours j. It becomes a little tricky to find the derivative (pairwise force) due to the presence of a summation term in the denominator. I did find the derivative:

F(R_ij) = a*f’(R_ij) - (b/sum(g(r_ij))^2)*g’(R_ij)

But implementing the above did not seem to give the force values I am expecting. I guess there might be some issues with double counting, which would have been easy to take care of if there had not been a denominator summation term.
I would like to have some thoughts and suggestions on how I can go about implementing the above function in LAMMPS.

Thanks,
Adarsh

Take a look at the EAM potentials in LAMMPS (pair_eam). The embedding term

is conceptually similar to your formula. They take the deriviate correctly.

Steve