  We present a tight-binding potential for transition metals, carbon, and
transition metal carbides, which has been optimized through a systematic
fitting procedure. A minimal basis, including the s, p electrons of carbon and
the d electrons of the transition metal, is used to obtain a transferable
tight-binding model of the carbon-carbon, metal-metal and metal-carbon
interactions applicable to binary systems. The Ni-C system is more specifically
discussed. The successful validation of the potential for different atomic
configurations indicates a good transferability of the model and makes it a
good choice for atomistic simulations sampling a large configuration space.
This approach appears to be very efficient to describe interactions in systems
containing carbon and transition metal elements.
