Ignacio Urrutia

Adsorption of 4He on a Single C60

The adsorption of 4He inside and outside a single fullerene C60 is studied. A physisorption potential is proposed. The energetics and structural features of C60-4HeN clusters are investigated within the framework of nonlocal density functionals. Particular attention is paid to the growth of the highly pronounced layered density profile. The evolution towards bulk liquid and surface thickness at the free interface are discussed.

Bending rigidity and higher-order curvature terms for the hard-sphere fluid near a curved wall.

In this work I derive analytic expressions for the curvature-dependent fluid-substrate surface tension of a hard-sphere fluid on a hard curved wall. In the first step, the curvature thermodynamic properties are found as truncated power series in the activity in terms of the exactly known second- and third-order cluster integrals of the hard-sphere fluid near spherical and cylindrical walls. These results are then expressed as packing fraction power series and transformed to different reference regions, which is equivalent to considering different positions of the dividing surface. Based on the truncated series it is shown that the bending rigidity of the system is non-null and that higher-order terms in the curvature also exist. In the second step, approximate analytic expressions for the surface tension, the Tolman length, the bending rigidity, and the Gaussian rigidity as functions of the packing fraction are found by considering the known terms of the series expansion complemented with a simple fitting approach. It is found that the obtained formulas accurately describe the curvature thermodynamic properties of the system; further, they are more accurate than any previously published expressions.

Statistical mechanics of two hard spheres in a spherical pore, exact analytic results in D dimension

This work is devoted to the exact statistical mechanics treatment of simple inhomogeneous few-body systems. The system of two hard spheres (HSs) confined in a hard spherical pore is systematically analyzed in terms of its dimensionality D. The canonical partition function and the one- and two-body distribution functions are analytically evaluated and a scheme of iterative construction of the D+1 system properties is presented. We analyze in detail both the effect of high confinement, when particles become caged, and the low density limit. Other confinement situations are also studied analytically and several relations between the two HSs in a spherical pore, two sticked HSs in a spherical pore, and two HSs on a spherical surface partition functions are traced. These relations make meaningful the limiting caging and low density behavior. Turning to the system of two HSs in a spherical pore, we also analytically evaluate the pressure tensor. The thermodynamic properties of the system are discussed. To accom...

Two hard spheres in a pore: Exact statistical mechanics for different shaped cavities

The partition function of two hard spheres in a hard-wall pore is studied, appealing to a graph representation. The exact evaluation of the canonical partition function and the one-body distribution function in three different shaped pores are achieved. The analyzed simple geometries are the cuboidal, cylindrical, and ellipsoidal cavities. Results have been compared with two previously studied geometries; the spherical pore and the spherical pore with a hard core. The search of common features in the analytic structure of the partition functions in terms of their length parameters and their volumes, surface area, edges length, and curvatures is addressed too. A general framework for the exact thermodynamic analysis of systems with few and many particles in terms of a set of thermodynamic measures is discussed. We found that an exact thermodynamic description is feasible based on the adoption of an adequate set of measures and the search of the free energy dependence on the adopted measure set. A relation similar to the Laplace equation for the fluid-vapor interface is obtained, which expresses the equilibrium between magnitudes that in extended systems are intensive variables. This exact description is applied to study the thermodynamic behavior of the two hard spheres in a hard-wall pore for the analyzed different geometries. We obtain analytically the external reversible work, the pressure on the wall, the pressure in the homogeneous region, the wall-fluid surface tension, the line tension, and other similar properties.

An exact formalism to study the thermodynamic properties of hard-sphere systems under spherical confinement.

This paper presents a modified grand canonical ensemble which provides a new simple and efficient scheme to study few-body fluid-like inhomogeneous systems under confinement. The new formalism is implemented to investigate the exact thermodynamic properties of a hard sphere (HS) fluid-like system with up to three particles confined in a spherical cavity. In addition, the partition function of this system was used to analyze the surface thermodynamic properties of the many-HS system and to derive the exact curvature dependence of both the surface tension and adsorption in powers of the density. The expressions for the surface tension and the adsorption were also obtained for the many-HS system outside of a fixed hard spherical object. We used these results to derive the dependence of the fluid-substrate Tolman length up to first order in density.

Mean properties and free energy of a few hard spheres confined in a spherical cavity

We use analytical calculations and event-driven molecular dynamics simulations to study a small number of hard sphere particles in a spherical cavity. The cavity is also taken as the thermal bath so that the system thermalizes by collisions with the wall. In that way, these systems of two, three, and four particles, are considered in the canonical ensemble. We characterize various mean and thermal properties for a wide range of number densities. We study the density profiles, the components of the local pressure tensor, the interface tension, and the adsorption at the wall. This spans from the ideal gas limit at low densities to the high-packing limit in which there are significant regions of the cavity for which the particles have no access, due the conjunction of excluded volume and confinement. The contact density and the pressure on the wall are obtained by simulations and compared to exact analytical results. We also obtain the excess free energy for N = 4, by using a simulated-assisted approach in which we combine simulation results with the knowledge of the exact partition function for two and three particles in a spherical cavity.

SPONTANEOUS SYMMETRY BREAKING AND FIRST-ORDER PHASE TRANSITIONS OF ADSORBED FLUIDS

A density functional formalism is applied to investigate the wetting behavior of Ne confined in slits composed of two parallel solid identical alkaline walls with increasing attractive strength lea...

Surface term for the capillary condensation transitions in a slit geometry

It is shown that a bare simple fluid model (SFM) proposed some years ago for studying adsorption between two semi-infinite solid walls can be improved by modifying the surface term in the grand potential for the film phase. Such a correction substantially improves the agreement between the predictions for phase transitions provided by that SFM and results obtained from calculations carried out for

LIQUID 4He ADSORBED FILMS ON VERY ATTRACTIVE SUBSTRATES

^4

Simple model of capillary condensation in cylindrical pores.

He with the density-functional method at zero temperature. The corrective term depends on the strength of the adsorption potential and observables of bulk helium.