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Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Critical endpoint and analytical phase diagram of attractive hard-core Yukawa spheres
Remco Tuinier1, Gerard J Fleer
1Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institut für Festkörperforschung, 52425 Jülich, Germany.t.tuinier@fz-juelich.de
Abstract:
We analytically calculate the gas-liquid critical endpoint (cep) for hard spheres with a Yukawa attraction. This cep is a boundary condition for the existence of a liquid. We use an analytical Helmholtz energy expression for the attractive Yukawa (hard) spheres based on the first-order mean spherical approximation to the attractive Yukawa potential by Tang and Lu (J. Chem. Phys. 1993, 99, 9828). This theory and our analytical simplification of it predict the gas-liquid and fluid-solid phase behavior, as found from computer simulations, very accurately as long as the range 1/kappa of attraction is not too short. We find that the cep is situated at kappasigma approximately 6 and at a contact potential around 2 kT. It follows that a liquid state is only possible when the attraction range is longer than (1/6) of the particle diameter sigma, and the attraction strength is smaller than 2 kT. The liquid region does not span more than 0.6 kT in strength, and there is also a relatively narrow window for the attraction range.
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