Abstract
The phenomenon of freezing by which a fluid is transformed into a solid, when the temperature is lowered or the pressure raised, is a very general property of bulk matter. During the past decades a lot of information about this phase transition has been obtained from both laboratory experiments and from computer simulations.2 Many workers in this field now think that the freezing transition of realistic and even complex systems can be understood in terms of the freezing of a few very simple model systems. Two such systems which have been brought to the foreground as good reference systems by liquid state theories are the hard-sphere (HS) system, whose freezing is monitoring the freezing of neutral fluids, and the one-component plasma (OCP) which can be used as a reference system in the theoretical study of the freezing of ionic liquids. The theoretical study of freezing within the realm of equilibrium statistical mechanics has, after decades of stagnation,3 made considerable progress recently. The main steps of this progress will now be summarized.
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