Partitioned density functional approach for a Lennard-Jones fluid.

Abstract

The existing classical density functional approach for nonuniform Lennard-Jones fluid, which is based on dividing the Lennard-Jones interaction potential into a short-range, repulsive part, and a smoothly varying, long-range, attractive tail, was improved by dividing the bulk second-order direct correlation function into strongly density-depending short-range part and weakly density-depending long-range part. The latter is treated by functional perturbation expansion truncated at the lowest order whose accuracy depends on how weakly the long-range part depends on the bulk density. The former is treated by the truncated functional perturbation expansion which is rewritten in the form of the simple weighted density approximation and incorporates the omitted higher-order terms by applying Lagrangian theorem of differential calculus to the reformulated form. The two approximations are put into the density profile equation of the density functional theory formalism to predict the density distribution for Lennard-Jones fluid in contact with a hard wall or between two hard walls within the whole density range for reduced temperature T(*)=1.35 and a density point for reduced temperature T(*)=1. The present partitioned density functional theory performs much better than several previous density functional perturbation theory approaches and a recently proposed bridge density functional approximation.