Recent work has suggested that vibrational effects can play a significant role in determining alloy phase equilibria. In order to better understand these effects and the methods used in their calculation, we investigate the vibrational properties of disordered Ni3A1 using the Embedded-Atom Method. We examine the effectiveness of the Special Quasirandom Structure (SQS) approximation, and find that an SQS-8 can accurately represent the vibrational thermodynamics of the disordered state. By the use of Monte Carlo (MC) techniques, we also find that the quasiharmonic approximation becomes less accurate as we approach the melting temperature, but that the accuracy may be extended to higher temperatures by resorting to the MC equation of state giving the specific volume as a function of temperature.

Linear-response theory provides an efficient approach for calculating the vibrational properties of solids. Moreover, because the use of supercells is eliminated, points with little or no symmetry in the Brillouin zone can be handled. This allows accurate determinations of quantities such as real-space force constants and electron-phonon coupling parameters. We present highly converged calculations of the spectral function α2F(ω) and the average electron-phonon coupling for Al, Pb, and Li. We also present results for the free energy of vacancy formation in Al calculated within the harmonic approximation.

We use the local-density-approximation to the density-functional theory to determine the axial polarizabilities of fullerene tubules as a function of length and winding topologies. Specifically, we present linear polarizabilities for tubules of composition C12H24, C36H24, C40H20 and C60H24. The size-dependent variation in the dipole-coupled gaps between pairs of occupied and unoccupied levels leads to enhancements in the polarizability per valence electron as the length of the tubule increases. The results are compared to recent densityfunctional based calculations of the linear and nonlinear polarizabilities for fullerene and benzene molecules.

We present first-principles local density functional calculations of the electronic structure and energetics of neutral and negatively charged fullerene molecules. We find thatthe negatively charged -1 state is stable relative to the neutral molecule and that the -2 state is stable relative to the neutral molecule but not to the -1 state of the molecule. We have also performed calculations of the electronic polarizabilities for different charged states and developed a simple model to estimate the dielectric constant of fullerene based crystals.

We present a method for the self-consistent determination of inter-atomic force-constants. Using non-local ab-initio pseudopotentials to represent the ion-electron interaction and linear response theory to calculate the self-consistent change in the electron density, we are able to calculate the dynamical matrices at arbitrary points in the Brillouin zone. Diagonalization of the dynamical matrix yields phonon eigenvectors and eigenvalues, and fourier inversion yields the real-space interatomic force-constants. We present numerical results for the phonon-dispersion of a variety of metals.