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Languages : en
Pages : 6
Book Description
Evidence for capillary waves at a liquid/vapor interface are presented from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of a system containing up to 1.24 million Lennard-Jones particles. Careful measurements show that the total interfacial width depends logarithmically on L{sub {parallel}}, the length of the simulation cell parallel to the interface, as predicted theoretically. The strength of the divergence of the interfacial width on L{sub {parallel}} depends inversely on the surface tension [gamma]. This allows us to measure [gamma] two ways since [gamma] can also be obtained from the difference in the pressure parallel and perpendicular to the interface. These two independent measures of [gamma] agree provided that the interfacial order parameter profile is fit to an error function and not a hyperbolic tangent, as often assumed. We explore why these two common fitting functions give different results for [gamma].
