Jim Lutsko

Jim Lutsko

he/him

My interests include Statistical Physics; Crystallization; Density Functional Theory, Simulation methods - particularly rare event techniques, Protein physics, Granular physics and Crystal Growth. I am based in the Physics of Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics group at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

[027] The freezing of soft spheres from a simple hard-sphere perturbation theory

It is shown that a simple perturbation expansion around the free energy of a (BCC/FCC) hard-sphere crystal leads to accurate predictions for the (BCC/FCC) freezing of soft spheres interacting via the inverse-power potential, V(r)= epsilon ( sigma /r)n, for all values of n including the extreme case of the one-component plasma (n=1). In particular, the authors find that for 1<or=n<or=6 there is both a fluid-BCC and BCC-FCC transition whereas for n>6 the BCC phase is unstable and only the fluid-FCC transition survives, in agreement with the computer simulations.

Recommended citation: J F Lutsko and M Baus, "The freezing of soft spheres from a simple hard-sphere perturbation theory", J. Phys.: Condens. Matter, 3, 6547 (1991)
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