Surface structure and energy of B2 type intermetallic compound NiAl

Abstract

The surface structure and energies for 22 surfaces of NiAl, an ordered intermetallic compound of B2 structure, have been studied by using embedded atom method. The results show that, for alternating Ni and Al surfaces with odd numbers of the sum of their three Miller indices, the energy difference between the Ni terminated surface and Al terminated surface increase linearly with increasing the interlayer distance. So from surface energy minimization, the Al terminated surface is favorable for each alternating Ni and Al surface. This is in agreement with experimental results. However, the energy of the (1 1 0) surface belonged to the other kind of the surface consisted of stoichiometric atomic layers and with even numbers of the sum of their three Miller indices, is the lowest in all two kinds of the surfaces. Therefore the (1 1 0) texture of NiAl appears mostly in the experiments.