Monte Carlo approach to the gas-liquid transition in porous materials

The gas-liquid transition of a "quenched-annealed"(QA) system is studied by grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulation. The "quenched" particles are hard spheres within configurations chosen randomly from those of an equilibrium hard-sphere system at given density. The fluid particles interact with the matrix particles by a hard-core potential and with each other by a hard-core potential and an additional potential of a Lennard-Jones type. Our results are in good qualitative agreement with various theoretical approaches. With increasing matrix density the critical temperature is lowered compared to that of the bulk system and the gap between the gas and liquid densities narrowed. Our simulations confirm, for this QA system, the possibility of two fluid-fluid transitions substituting for the unique gas-liquid transition of the bulk system. They demonstrate the necessity to average over a significant number of matrix realizations in order to obtain a quantitative location of the phase coexistence lines.