Stacking fault energies of Be, Mg, Al, Cu, Ag, and Au

Expressions for the stacking fault energies of close packed metals are derived. The technique employs periodic boundary conditions on a crystal containing a large number of widely spaced faults. All necessary summations are performed in wavenumber space. Reasonable agreement is obtained with experiment for the metals Be, Mg, Al, Cu, Ag, and Au. Contrary to some earlier work, the electrostatic contribution to the fault energy is found to be quite significant. The noble metal calculations include an evaluation of the d state overlap energy term; and this is shown to be small in comparison to the other contributions.