Oscillating Yukawa fluid at a hard wall: field theory description^*

* This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr Y. Tang who passed away at the end of 2014 at an early age.

ABSTRACT

A field-theoretical approach is applied to study the structure of an oscillating Yukawa fluid in contact with a hard wall. The system is described beyond the mean field approximation with the Gaussian fluctuations taken into account. Analytical expressions for the pair correlation function, the density profiles, and the adsorption coefficient are derived. These results are analysed for different values of the temperature and the bulk density as well as the parameters of the pair potential. In order to estimate the validity of the applied approximations, the theoretical results are compared with the original computer simulations data. We show that the Gaussian approximation provides a much better description of the fluid density profile as compared to the mean field approximation.

KEYWORDS:

• Oscillating Yukawa fluid
• field theory
• hard wall
• density profile
• adsorption

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jean-Pierre Badiali for useful discussions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the framework of the PICS project [PICS04768].