Argon Interaction with Gold Surfaces: Ab Initio-Assisted Determination of Pair Ar-Au Potentials for Molecular Dynamics Simulations.

Global potentials for the interaction between the Ar atom and gold surfaces are investigated and Ar-Au pair potentials suitable for molecular dynamics simulations are derived. Using a periodic plane-wave representation of the electronic wave function, the nonlocal van-der-Waals vdW-DF2 and vdW-OptB86 approaches have been proved to describe better the interaction. These global interaction potentials have been decomposed to produce pair potentials.