You might be interested in our new paper in which we used the EAM to include many body effects for a range of fluorite oxides (CeO2, UO2, AmO2, CmO2, NpO2 and PuO2). These are materials that show significant ionic character.
Somewhat unusually for EAM we assigned ions within the system charges and we continued to use the Ewald sum to calculate electrostatics. Given the importance of the crystal's Madelung field to material properties, the inclusion of these features is probably important to the description of crystalline ionic materials even when used with the EAM.
In our case the model we developed can primarily be though of as a pair-potential model where the EAM provides an environmentally sensitive perturbation to the pairwise interactions. Moving the position and depth of an atoms potential well in sympathy to the surrounding ionic density. The inclusion of the EAM really helped improve the model's ability to reproduce elastic constants (in particular the Cauchy violation) and allowed the correct thermal expansion behaviour to be described over a wide temperature range.
The reference for the paper is as follows (although I'll share an RG link with you in a moment):
"A many-body potential approach to modelling the thermomechanical properties of actinide oxides".
M W D Cooper, M J D Rushton, R W Grimes
Journal of Physics Condensed Matter (Impact Factor: 2.36). 03/2014; 26(10):105401. DOI:10.1088/0953-8984/26/10/105401
You might also want to look at the following reference on using the EAM with uranium carbide, this a material that shows metallic, covalent and ionic character:
A. Chartier and L. Van Brutzel, Nucl. Instruments Methods Phys. Res. Sect. B Beam Interact. with Mater. Atoms, 2007, 255, 146–150.
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