Review article: ion pair potentials for alkali halides and some applications to liquids and defect studies

We review the basis on which interionic potentials for alkali halides are obtained. We find that the sizes of the van der Waals terms are known poorly and that the polarizable ion models lack the necessary thermodynamic corrections, however small they may be, to fit low temperature properties of the solid. Although the quantum statistical calculations indicated some damping of van der Waals interactions due to ionic overlap, a systematic study of the basic and modified approaches shows them to be unsatisfactory.