Revisit of interfacial free energy of the hard sphere system near hard wall

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Monte Carlo method to accurately calculate the interfacial free energy between a hard sphere system and a hard wall, revealing complete wetting of the wall by the crystal phase.

Contribution

A new Monte Carlo approach for interfacial free energy calculation applied to hard sphere systems near a hard wall.

Findings

Calculated interfacial free energies for fluid and solid phases.

Determined the contact angle indicating complete wetting.

Validated the method's high accuracy in predicting wetting behavior.

Abstract

We propose a simple Monte Carlo method to calculate the interfacial free energy between the substrate and the material. Using this method we investigate the interfacial free energys of the hard sphere fluid and solid phases near a smooth hard wall. According to the obtained interfacial free energys of the coexisting fluid and solid phases and the Young equation we are able to determine the contact angle with high accuracy, cos$\theta$ = 1:010(31), which indicates that a smooth hard wall can be wetted completely by the hard sphere crystal at the interface between the wall and the hard sphere fluid.