8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

Wed 711:10-14:00P5.135Equilibrium properties of Hertzian sphere fluidsJonas Riest 1 and Christos N. Likos 11 Faculty of Physics, Boltzmanngasse 5, 1090, Vienna, AustriaWe investigate the properties of Hertzian spheres using Density-Functional Theory and computersimulations. To this end, we first employ the hypernetted-chain approximation to calculate thedirect correlation function, the radial distribution function and the static structure factor for a widerange of densities and temperatures. We find that in a medium density range the correlations in thesystem grow with the strength of the interaction potential. We compare these findings with resultsobtained by use of the density-functional mean field approximation. We observe very small deviations,of less than 1%, which for high densities as well as high temperatures are even significantlylower. This justifies the use of mean field approximations in the further work. Therein, we studydensity profiles of fluids of Hertzian spheres in the presence of external fields generated by wallsor by gravity. In the first case we observe that the attraction or repulsion of the particles at the walldoes not only depend on the interaction potential of the wall, but also on the interaction potentialof the particles and on the density of the system. Furthermore, we find in particular for stronginteraction potentials a short-ranged layering of the particles near the wall. In the second case wediscover that for higher chemical potentials the decay of the density was widely linear, whereas forlow ones the density distribution is akin to that given by the barometric law.135