The thermal expansion of a face-centered cubic lattice with central two-body interactions

Abstract

The thermal expansion e is calculated by minimizing the free energy, including the cubic and quartic phonon-interaction terms. The free energy is expanded to third order in e. The work is closely related to that of Maradudin and Maradudin, Flinn and Coldwell-Horsfall. The resulting formulas are applied to the case of solid argon, for which the central interaction assumed may be considered rather realistic.