Free-energy functional for freezing transitions: Hard sphere systems freezing into crystalline and amorphous structures

Abstract

A free-energy functional that contains both the symmetry conserved and symmetry broken parts of the direct pair correlation function has been used to investigate the freezing of a system of hard spheres into crystalline and amorphous structures. The freezing parameters for fluid-crystal transition have been found to be in very good agreement with the results found from simulations. We considered amorphous structures found from the molecular dynamics simulations at packing fractions $\eta$ lower than the glass close packing fraction ${\eta }_J$ and investigated their stability compared to that of a homogeneous fluid. The existence of free-energy minimum corresponding to a density distribution of overlapping Gaussians centered around an amorphous lattice depicts the deeply supercooled state with a heterogeneous density profile.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Correlation functions in liquids and crystals : Free energy functional and liquid - crystal transition
• Integral Equation Theory for Pair Correlation Functions in a Crystal
• Freezing of a two dimensional fluid in to a crystalline phase : Density functional approach
• Replica Field Theory for a Generalized Franz--Parisi Potential of Inhomogeneous Glassy Systems: New Closure and the Associated Self-Consistent Equation