Electrical conductivity of warm expanded aluminum

The electronic and ionic structures of warm expanded aluminum are determined self-consistently using an average-atom formalism based on density-functional theory and Gibbs-Bogolyubov inequality. Ion configurations are generated using a least-square fit of the pair distribution function deduced from the average-atom model calculations. The electrical conductivity of the system is computed from the Kubo-Greenwood formula for the optical conductivity implemented in a molecular dynamics scheme based on density-functional theory. This method goes beyond the Ziman approach commonly used in the average-atom formalism. Moreover, it is faster than performing ab initio molecular dynamics simulations to obtain ion configurations for the conductivity calculation. Numerical results and comparisons with experiments are presented and discussed. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.