Calculation of phase diagrams in the multithermal-multibaric ensemble

Abstract

From the Ising model and the Lennard-Jones fluid, to water and the iron-carbon system, phase diagrams are an indispensable tool to understand phase equilibria. In spite of the effort of the simulation community the calculation of a large portion of a phase diagram using computer simulation is still today a significant challenge. Here we propose a method to calculate phase diagrams involving liquid and solid phases by the reversible transformation of the liquid and the solid. To this end we introduce an order parameter that breaks the rotational symmetry and we leverage our recently introduced method to sample the multithermal-multibaric ensemble. In this way in a single molecular dynamics simulation we are able to compute the liquid-solid coexistence line for entire regions of the temperature and pressure phase diagram. We apply our approach to the bcc-liquid phase diagram of sodium and the fcc-bcc-liquid phase diagram of aluminum.