No Arabic abstract
Although much is known about the metastable liquid branch of hard spheres--from low dimension $d$ up to $dtoinfty$--its crystal counterpart remains largely unexplored for $d>3$. In particular, it is unclear whether the crystal phase is thermodynamically stable in high dimensions and thus whether a mean-field theory of crystals can ever be exact. In order to determine the stability range of hard sphere crystals, their equation of state is here estimated from numerical simulations, and fluid-crystal coexistence conditions are determined using a generalized Frenkel-Ladd scheme to compute absolute crystal free energies. The results show that the crystal phase is stable at least up to $d=9$, and the dimensional trends suggest that crystal stability likely persists well beyond that point.
Population annealing is a sequential Monte Carlo scheme well-suited to simulating equilibrium states of systems with rough free energy landscapes. Here we use population annealing to study a binary mixture of hard spheres. Population annealing is a parallel version of simulated annealing with an extra resampling step that ensures that a population of replicas of the system represents the equilibrium ensemble at every packing fraction in an annealing schedule. The algorithm and its equilibration properties are described and results are presented for a glass-forming fluid composed of a 50/50 mixture of hard spheres with diameter ratio of 1.4:1. For this system, we obtain precise results for the equation of state in the glassy regime up to packing fractions $varphi approx 0.60$ and study deviations from the BMCSL equation of state. For higher packing fractions, the algorithm falls out of equilibrium and a free volume fit predicts jamming at packing fraction $varphi approx 0.667$. We conclude that population annealing is an effective tool for studying equilibrium glassy fluids and the jamming transition.
For binary fluid mixtures of spherical particles in which the two species are sufficiently different in size, the dominant wavelength of oscillations of the pair correlation functions is predicted to change from roughly the diameter of the large species to that of the small species along a sharp crossover line in the phase diagram [C. Grodon, M. Dijkstra, R. Evans & R. Roth, J.Chem.Phys. 121, 7869 (2004)]. Using particle-resolved colloid experiments in 3d we demonstrate that crossover exists and that its location in the phase diagram is in quantitative agreement with the results of both theory and our Monte-Carlo simulations. In contrast with previous work [J. Baumgartl, R. Dullens, M. Dijkstra, R. Roth & C. Bechinger, Phys.Rev.Lett. 98, 198303 (2007)], where a correspondence was drawn between crossover and percolation of both species, in our 3d study we find that structural crossover is unrelated to percolation.
An overview of some analytical approaches to the computation of the structural and thermodynamic properties of single component and multicomponent hard-sphere fluids is provided. For the structural properties, they yield a thermodynamically consistent formulation, thus improving and extending the known analytical results of the Percus-Yevick theory. Approximate expressions for the contact values of the radial distribution functions and the corresponding analytical equations of state are also discussed. Extensions of this methodology to related systems, such as sticky hard spheres and square-well fluids, as well as its use in connection with the perturbation theory of fluids are briefly addressed.
We show how to generalize the Lattice Switch Monte Carlo method to calculate the phase diagram of a binary system. A global coordinate transformation is combined with a modification of particle diameters, enabling the multi-component system in question to be explored and directly compared to a suitable reference state in a single Monte Carlo simulation. We use the method to evaluate the free energies of binary hard sphere crystals. Calculations at moderate size ratios, alpha=0.58 and alpha=0.73, are in agreement with previous results, and confirm AB2 and AB13 as stable structures. We also find that the AB(CsCl) structure is not entropically stable at the size ratio and volume at which it has been reported experimentally, and therefore that those observations cannot be explained by packing effects alone.
By extending the nonequilibrium potential refinement algorithm and lattice switch method to the semigrand ensemble, the semigrand potentials of the fcc and hcp structures of polydisperse hard-sphere crystals are calculated with the bias sampling scheme. The result shows that the fcc structure is more stable than the hcp structure for polydisperse hard-sphere crystals below the terminal polydispersity.