Bending and Gaussian rigidities of confined soft spheres from second-order virial series

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates the bending and Gaussian rigidities of confined soft-sphere fluids using second-order virial series, focusing on curvature effects and universal relations at low density.

Contribution

It provides analytical expressions for bending and Gaussian rigidities of confined soft-sphere fluids, highlighting curvature contributions and evaluating truncation procedures in low-density regimes.

Findings

Analytical expressions for bending and Gaussian rigidities derived.

Curvature contributions significantly affect surface tension calculations.

Universal relations for low-density fluids are validated.

Abstract

We use virial series to study the equilibrium properties of confined soft-spheres fluids interacting through the inverse-power potentials. The confinement is induced by hard walls with planar, spherical and cylindrical shapes. We evaluate analytically the coefficients of order two in density of the wall-fluid surface tension $\gamma$ and analyze the curvature contributions to the free energy. Emphasis is in bending and Gaussian rigidities, which are found analytically at order two in density. Their contribution to $\gamma(R)$ and the accuracy of different truncation procedures to the low curvature expansion are discussed. Finally, several universal relations that apply to low-density fluids are analyzed.