Elastic properties of soft sphere crystal from Monte Carlo simulations

Elastic properties of faced centered cubic (fcc) crystals composed of soft spheres, interacting through potentials of the form u(r) ~ r(-n), have been investigated by Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. It is shown that both the softness parameter (n(-1)) and temperature strongly influence the elastic properties of the studied system. The simulations show explicitly that when T > 0 the elastic constants of the hard sphere crystal can be obtained by taking the limit n --> infinity of soft spheres. When T --> 0 for any finite n, the elastic constants of the soft spheres tend to those of the static model. At all temperatures and softness parameters studied here, n, the Poisson's ratio in [110] (perpendicular direction) is negative.