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Updated: May 18, 2026

Analyzing Melts and Fluids from Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Simulations with the UMD Package
Published on: September 17, 2021
Direct first-principles chemical potential calculations of liquids
Qi-Jun Hong1, Axel van de Walle
1Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA. qhong@caltech.edu
Abstract:
We propose a scheme that drastically improves the efficiency of Widom's particle insertion method by efficiently sampling cavities while calculating the integrals providing the chemical potentials of a physical system. This idea enables us to calculate chemical potentials of liquids directly from first-principles without the help of any reference system, which is necessary in the commonly used thermodynamic integration method. As an example, we apply our scheme, combined with the density functional formalism, to the calculation of the chemical potential of liquid copper. The calculated chemical potential is further used to locate the melting temperature. The calculated results closely agree with experiments.
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