Understanding the physical origin of mechanisms in random alloys that lead to the formation of microstructures requires an understanding of their average behavior and, equally important, the role of local fluctuations around the average. Material properties of random alloys can be computed using direct simulations on random configurations. However, some properties are very difficult to compute, for others it is not even fully understood how to compute them using random sampling, in particular, interaction energies between multiple defects. To that end, we develop an atomistic model that does the averaging on the level of interatomic potentials. With such an average interatomic interaction model the problem of averaging via random sampling is bypassed since the problem of computing material properties on random configurations reduces to the problem of computing material properties on single crystals, the average alloy, which can be done using standard techniques.To be predictive, we develop our average model on the class of linear machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). To that end, using tools from higher-order statistics, we derive an analytic expansion of average many-body per-atom energies of linear MLIPs in terms of average tensor products of the feature vectors of the underlying machine-learning model that scales linearly with the size of an atomic neighborhood. In order to avoid forming higher-order tensors composed of products of feature vectors, we develop an implementation using equivariant tensor network (ETN) potentials, a class of linear MLIPs, that contracts the feature vectors to small-sized tensors, and then takes the average. We validate the average ETN potential by demonstrating the convergence of direct Monte Carlo simulations to the exact value for properties of the NbMoTaW medium-entropy alloy. Simulating average properties of dislocations has thus far only been possible with average embedded atom method potentials that, however, predict artificial polarized cores. Here, we show that average ETN potentials predict the compact screw dislocation core structure, in agreement with density functional theory. Hence, we anticipate that our model will become useful for understanding mechanistic origins of material properties and for developing predictive models of mechanical properties of random alloys.
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