Summary

In this chapter, some of the existing LAMMPS pair styles have been analyzed to demonstrate the roles played by various methods in performing the required calculations and exchanging information. Other variants of potentials implemented in LAMMPS include the many-body (that is, non-pairwise) Stillinger-Weber (SW) potential and the Pair List option that assigns pair coefficients to individual atom pairs instead of atom type pairs.

Position-dependent potentials are implemented using a functional form in the compute() method or can be implemented in a tabulated form read by the pair style. Non-conservative forces can also be implemented alongside by defining the appropriate force functions.

You can now use the lessons and skills learned from this chapter to modify the appropriate methods in a pair potential to customize it per your simulation requirements.

In the next chapter, we will analyze selected compute styles to illustrate the inner mechanism of the code as it has...