Pair_style hybrid/overlay with lepton?

LAMMPS LAMMPS General Discussion
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1

I would like to use pair_style lepton with DPD thermostat, for which I used pair_style hybrid/overlay. Is there a way to “overlay” two styles. Forgive me if it’s a pretty noobish question (in Baldrick’s words, again it’s because…), but I seems to be unable to find it discussed online.
Thank you,
T. Bulba

2

Please see the documentation for pair style hybrid/overlay. It’s application is generic.

3

Thank you! Was is a “Yes” or was is a “No”? Reading LAMMPS documentation is like interpreting a Bible: it is entangled with cross-references. It is, very possibly, very good for those who knows everything about LAMMPS, but it is often cryptic for novices, like a Rosetta Stone. Iwill read it again, and perhaps one day I will find an enjoyable reading, like was with thermodynamics course.

4

I suspect that you are not approaching reading the documentation correctly.

You will rarely find a list of “these combination of commands are supported” or “use this, not that” style of instructions. This would be ok for a tutorial, but unmaintainable for a reference documentation. Since LAMMPS is more of a “simulation toolkit” than a program set up for a specific purpose, you have to assemble command in a similar fashion as you can build things with a set of legos. For as long as you have the same size and spacing of knobs on one side and a matching set of holes on the other, they can be used together. Given the number of keywords and styles, there are far too many permutations to list them all.

You can make some basic assumptions:

  • the LAMMPS documentation will state, if two commands are known to be incompatible (in some cases it is unknown, though).
  • you can always make a test and see if you get reasonable results, e.g. pair style lepton (by itself) and pair style hybrid/overlay with pair styles zero and lepton should produce the same results
  • rarely will people in the forum give you a confirmation if something is compatible, since it is far faster to just try it and see if the result is as expected. this is just normal practice of doing simulations
  • I agree on the comparison of the LAMMPS documentation with the Bible. It is the authoritative references that specifies in details all intended functionality (the desire for completeness makes some parts hard to read). But that is a good thing, you just have to learn to pick the parts that apply to your problem and not get distracted by the parts that don’t. One caveat, though. The LAMMPS documentation was written by humans, so there may be mistakes and overlooked details. Also, some parts are rather old and were written before other useful/related features were added and thus may be lacking suggestions for better solutions.

The LAMMPS developers always welcome input from people that provide suggestions for how to better formulate the more cryptic parts of the documentation.

5

@bulba I think some day you will find it a blessing that there are people in the planet that take their time to write such a detailed documentation to the point where sometimes it even answers questions before you have them :")

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