A statistical field theory approach applied to the liquid vapor interface

TL;DR

This paper develops a statistical field theory framework for describing the liquid-vapor interface in simple fluids, deriving a $$ theory directly from the grand partition function without phenomenological assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces an exact field theoretical formulation of the liquid-vapor interface starting from the grand partition function, avoiding effective Hamiltonians or density field assumptions.

Findings

Capillary wave theory emerges as a one-loop approximation of the developed theory.

The approach yields a $$ theory with no unknown parameters.

The method provides a direct link between microscopic interactions and interface fluctuations.

Abstract

Last years, there has been a renewed interest in the utilization of statistical field theory methods for the description of systems at equilibrium both in the vicinity and away from critical points, in particular in the field of liquid state physics. These works deal in general with homogeneous systems, although recently the study of liquids in the vicinity of hard walls has also been considered in this way. On the other hand, effective Hamiltonian pertaining to the $\phi^4$ theory family have been written and extensively used for the description of inhomogeneous systems either at the simple interface between equilibrium phases or for the description of wetting. In the present work, we focus on a field theoretical description of the liquid vapor interface of simple fluids. We start from the representation of the grand partition function obtained from the Hubbard-Stratonovich transform leading to an exact formulation of the problem, namely neither introducing an effective Hamiltonian nor associating the field to the one-body density of the liquid. Using as a reference system the hard sphere fluid and imposing the coexistence condition, the expansion of the Hamiltonian obtained yields a usual $\phi^4$ theory without unknown parameter. An important point is that the so-called capillary wave theory appears as an approximation of the one-loop theory in the functional expansion of the Hamiltonian, without any need to an underlying phenomenology.