Stacking faults in magnesium

The energetics of various low-energy intrinsic, extrinsic, and twinlike stacking fault configurations in hexagonal-close-packed magnesium are determined from first-principles calculations. To zeroth-order, the ordering of the energies can be understood in terms of the number of fcc-like planes in the sequence of close-packed planes. However, such a simple model fails to quantitatively reproduce the calculated energies of the faults. We propose a...