Sodium melting temperature

Greetings everyone!

I’m simulating the melting process of small sodium clusters, typically of 189 or 341 atoms. For some reason the melting begins at 50 or 70 K temperatures whereas experiments give 260 K melting point for sodium clusters of the same size. The physics of the process itself is OK and all I need to fix is this odd shift of melting temperature. Could you give me any suggestions where is the problem could lie?

I used eam.fs potential from NIST repository. There is my LAMMPS code:

Sodium melting

units metal
boundary f f f
atom_style atomic

lattice bcc 4.23

region my_lattice block 0 5 0 5 0 5
region outside block -12 18 -12 18 -12 18
region box intersect 2 my_lattice outside

create_box 1 outside
create_atoms 1 region my_lattice

pair_style eam/fs
pair_coeff * * /usr/share/lammps/potentials/Na.eam.fs Na

thermo 1
timestep 0.001

neighbor 0.3 bin
neigh_modify every 1 delay 0

------ relax the cluster

minimize 1.e-10 1.e-10 1000 100000

reset_timestep 0

velocity all create 10 123465 mom yes rot yes dist gaussian
fix 1 all nvt temp 10 210 0.1

compute vol all voronoi/atom

thermo 10
thermo_style custom step temp

dump 1 all custom 20 Na_3.lammpstrj id type x y z c_vol[1]
write_data data.Na_3

thermo_style custom step temp
run 100000

Regards,
Grad student
SPBU
Ruslan Mukhamadiarov

Greetings everyone!

I'm simulating the melting process of small sodium clusters, typically of
189 or 341 atoms. For some reason the melting begins at 50 or 70 K
temperatures whereas experiments give 260 K melting point for sodium
clusters of the same size. The physics of the process itself is OK and all I
need to fix is this odd shift of melting temperature. Could you give me any
suggestions where is the problem could lie?

have you checked for what specific conditions that particular
potential has been parameterized?
most potentials have only limited transferability. such is the nature
of empirical potentials.

axel.