In computational chemistry and computational physics, the embedded atom model, embedded-atom method or EAM, is an approximation describing the energy between atoms and is a type of interatomic potential.
In the original model, by Murray Daw and Mike Baskes,[1] the latter functions represent the electron density.
The EAM is related to the second moment approximation to tight binding theory, also known as the Finnis-Sinclair model.
[2] Embedded-atom methods are widely used in molecular dynamics simulations.
In a simulation, the potential energy of an atom,
is the contribution to the electron charge density from atom
is an embedding function that represents the energy required to place atom
Since the electron cloud density is a summation over many atoms, usually limited by a cutoff radius, the EAM potential is a multibody potential.
For a binary alloy, the EAM potential requires seven functions: three pair-wise interactions (A-A, A-B, B-B), two embedding functions, and two electron cloud contribution functions.
Generally these functions are provided in a tabularized format and interpolated by cubic splines.