Tension and Stiffness of the Hard Sphere Crystal-Fluid Interface

Härtel, A.; Oettel, M.; Rozas, R. E.; Egelhaaf, S. U.; Horbach, J.; Löwen, H.

Abstract

A combination of fundamental measure density functional theory and Monte Carlo computer simulation is used to determine the orientation-resolved interfacial tension and stiffness for the equilibrium hard-sphere crystal-fluid interface. Microscopic density functional theory is in quantitative agreement with simulations and predicts a tension of 0.66k(B)T/sigma(2) with a small anisotropy of about 0.025k(B)T and stiffnesses with, e.g., 0.53k(B)T/sigma(2) for the (001) orientation and 1.03k(B)T/sigma(2) for the (111) orientation. Here k(B)T is denoting the thermal energy and sigma the hard-sphere diameter. We compare our results with existing experimental findings.

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Título según WOS: Tension and Stiffness of the Hard Sphere Crystal-Fluid Interface
Título de la Revista: PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volumen: 108
Número: 21
Editorial: American Physical Society
Fecha de publicación: 2012
Idioma: English
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.226101
DOI:

10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.226101

Notas: ISI