  We develop an analytic and environment-dependent interatomic potential for
the overlap repulsion in solid argon, based on an approximate treatment of the
non-orthogonal Tight-Binding theory for the closed-shell systems. The present
model can well reproduce the observed elastic properties of solid argon
including Cauchy violation at high pressures, yet very simple. A useful and
novel analysis is given to show how the elastic properties are related to the
environment-dependence incorporated into a generic pairwise potential. The
present study has a close link to the broad field of computational materials
science, in which the inclusion of environment dependence in short-ranged
repulsive part of a potential model is sometimes crucial in predicting the
elastic properties correctly.
