Communication: Long range corrections in liquid-vapor interface simulations

Long range corrections (lrc) for the potential energy and for the force in planar liquid-vapor interface simulations are considered for spherically symmetric interactions. First, it is stated that for the Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid the lrc for the energy Δu of Janeček [J. Phys. Chem. B 110, 6264 (2006)] is the same as that of Lotfi et al. [Mol. Simul. 5, 233 (1990)]. Second, we present the lrc for the force Δ for any spherically symmetric interaction as a derivative of Δu plus a surface integral over the cut-off sphere by using the extended Leibniz rule of Flanders [Am. Math. Monthly 80, 615 (1973)]. This Δ corrects the incomplete lrc Δ₁ of Lotfi et al. and agrees with the result of Janeček obtained by direct averaging of the forces. Third, we show that the molecular dynamics (MD) results for the surface tension γ of the LJ fluid with size parameter σ obtained by Werth et al. [Physica A 392, 2359 (2013)] with the lrc Δ of Janeček and a cut-off radius r_c = 3σ agree with the results of Mecke et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 107, 9264 (1997)] obtained with the lrc Δ₁ of Lotfi et al. and r = 6.5σ within -0.4% to +1.6%. Moreover, using only the MD results for γ of Werth et al., we obtain for the LJ fluid a new surface tension correlation which also represents the γ-values of Mecke et al. within ±0.7%. The critical temperature resulting from the correlation is T = 1.317 66 and is in very good agreement with T = 1.32 of the reference equation of state for the LJ fluid given by Thol et al. [J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data 45, 023101 (2016)].