The influence of the liquid slab thickness on the planar vapor-liquid interfacial tension

Abstract

One of the long standing challenges in molecular simulation is the description of interfaces. On the molecular length scale, finite size effects significantly influence the properties of the interface such as its interfacial tension, which can be reliably investigated by molecular dynamics simulation of planar vapor-liquid interfaces. For the Lennard-Jones fluid, finite size effects are examined here by varying the thickness of the liquid slab. It is found that the surface tension and density in the center of the liquid region decreases significantly for thin slabs. The influence of the slab thickness on both the liquid density and the surface tension is found to scale with 1/S^3 in terms of the slab thickness S, and a linear correlation between both effects is obtained. The results corroborate the analysis of Malijevský and Jackson, J. Phys.: Cond. Mat. 24: 464121 (2012), who recently detected an analogous effect for the surface tension of liquid nanodroplets.

References in corpus (4)

• Application of Ewald summations to long-range dispersion forces
• Phase diagram and universality of the Lennard-Jones gas-liquid system
• A perspective on the interfacial properties of nanoscopic liquid drops
• Computing the local pressure in molecular dynamics simulations

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Properties of Liquid Clusters in Large-scale Molecular Dynamics Nucleation Simulations
• Long range correction for multi-site Lennard-Jones models and planar interfaces
• Simultaneous description of bulk and interfacial properties of fluids by the Mie potential
• An Energy-Based Interface Detection Method for Phase Change Processes in Nanoconfinements
• The Intrinsic Fragility of the Liquid-Vapor Interface: A Stress Network Perspective