Liquid–vapour transition of the long range Yukawa fluid

Abstract

Two liquid state theories, the self-consistent Ornstein–Zernike equation (SCOZA) and the hierarchical reference theory (HRT) are shown, by comparison with Monte Carlo simulations, to perform extremely well in predicting the liquid–vapour coexistence of the hard-core Yukawa (HCY) fluid when the interaction is long range. The long range of the potential is treated in the simulations using both an Ewald sum and hyperspherical boundary conditions. In addition, we present an analytical optimized mean field theory which is exact in the limit of an infinitely long-range interaction. The work extends a previous one by C. Caccamo, G. Pellicane, D. Costa, D. Pini, and G. Stell, Phys. Rev. E 60, 5533 (1999) for short-range interactions.

Keywords:

• Yukawa potential
• Critical phenomena
• Monte Carlo Simulation
• SCOZA
• HRT

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant through the Programme d'Actions Intégrées AMADEUS under Project Nos 06648PB and FR 09/2007, by the Hochschuljubiläumsstiftung der Stadt Wien under Project Number 1757/2007 and by the Marie Curie European Network MRTN-CT-2003-504712. Federica Lo Verso thanks Davide Pini, Alberto Parola and Luciano Reatto for helpful discussions.