Hard disk model

Hard disks are hard spheres in two dimensions. The hard disk intermolecular pair potential is given by

$\Phi _{12}\left(r\right)=\left\{{\begin{array}{lll}\infty &;&r<\sigma \\0&;&r\geq \sigma \end{array}}\right.$

where $\Phi _{12}\left(r\right)$ is the intermolecular pair potential between two disks at a distance $r:=|\mathbf {r} _{1}-\mathbf {r} _{2}|$, and $\sigma$ is the diameter of the disk.

Phase transitions

Despite the apparent simplicity of this model/system, the phase behaviour and the nature of the phase transitions remains an area of active study. In a recent publication by Mak (Ref. 5) using over 4 million particles $(2048^{2})$ one appears to have the phase diagram isotropic $(\rho \leq 0.890)$ hexatic $(\rho >0.920)$ solid.

Equations of state

Main article: Equations of state for hard disks

Virial coefficients

Main article: Hard sphere: virial coefficients

External links

• Hard disks and spheres computer code on SMAC-wiki.

References

1. Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna W. Rosenbluth, Marshall N. Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller and Edward Teller, "Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines", Journal of Chemical Physics 21 pp.1087-1092 (1953)

1. Ya G Sinai "Dynamical systems with elastic reflections", Russian Mathematical Surveys 25 pp. 137-189 (1970)
2. Katherine J. Strandburg, John A. Zollweg, and G. V. Chester "Bond-angular order in two-dimensional Lennard-Jones and hard-disk systems", Physical Review B 30 pp. 2755 - 2759 (1984)
3. Carl McBride and Carlos Vega "Fluid solid equilibrium for two dimensional tangent hard disk chains from Wertheim's perturbation theory", Journal of Chemical Physics 116 pp. 1757-1759 (2002)
4. Nándor Simányi "Proof of the Boltzmann-Sinai ergodic hypothesis for typical hard disk systems", Inventiones Mathematicae 154 pp. 123-178 (2003)
5. C. H. Mak "Large-scale simulations of the two-dimensional melting of hard disks", Physical Review E 73 065104(R) (2006)