Free-energy calculations Lennard-Jones fluids

So far we have discussed various techniques for computing the PMF. The other type of free energy calculation commonly performed is alchemical transformation where two different systems are compared. Such calculations have many applications such as Lennard-Jones fluid with and without dipoles for each particles, comparison of ethanol (CH3CH2OH) and ethane thiol (CH3CH2SH), replacing one amino acid by another in a protein, changing the formula for a compound in drug discovery, etc. 

The integrals are over the full two-dimensional volume F. For the classical contribution to the free energy /3/d([p]) the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff functional has been used in the form recently introduced by Ebner et al. [314] which is known to reproduce accurately the phase diagram of the Lennard-Jones system in three dimensions. In the classical part of the free energy functional, as an input the Ornstein-Zernike direct correlation function for the hard disc fluid is required. For the DFT calculations reported, the accurate and convenient analytic form due to Rosenfeld [315] has been used for this quantity. 

The application of this approach to the hard-sphere system was presented by Ree and Hoover in a footnote to their paper on the hard-sphere phase diagram. They made a calculation where they used Eq. (2.27) for the solid phase and an accurate equation of state for the fluid phase to obtain results that are in very close agreement with their results from MC simulations. The LJD theory in combination with perturbation theory for the liquid state free energy has been applied to the calculation of solid-fluid equilibrium for the Lennard-Jones 12-6 potential by Henderson and Barker [138] and by Mansoori and Canfield [139]. Ross has applied a similar approch to the exp-6 potential. A similar approach was used for square well potentials by Young [140]. More recent applications have been made to nonspherical molecules [100,141] and mixtures [101,108,109,142]. 

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