Coarse grained approach to first principles modeling of radiation cascade in large Fe supercells

Classical Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations characterizing dislocations and radiation damage typically treat 10⁵-10⁷ atoms. First principles techniques employed to understand systems at an atomistic level are not practical for such large systems consisting of millions of atoms. We present an efficient coarse grained (CG) approach to calculate local electronic and magnetic properties of large MD-generated structures from the first principles. Local atomic magnetic moments in crystalline Fe are perturbed by the presence of radiation generated vacancies and interstitials. The effects are most pronounced near the defect cores and decay slowly as the strain field of the defects decrease with distance. We develop the CG technique based on the Locally Self-consistent Multiple Scattering (LSMS) method that exploits the near-sightedness of the electron Green function. The atomic positions were determined by MD with an embedded atom force field. The local moments in the neighborhood of the defect cores are calculated with first-principles based on full local structure information. Atoms in the rest of the system are modeled by representative atoms with approximated properties. The calculations result in local moments near the defect centers with first-principles accuracy, while capturing coarse-grained details of local moments at greater length scales. This CG approach makes these large scale structures amenable to first principles study.