The re-entrant transition from the molecular to atomic phases of dense fluids: The case of hydrogen.

A simple phenomenological thermodynamic model is developed to describe the chemical bonding and unbonding in homonuclear diatomic systems. This model describes the entire phase diagram of dimer-forming systems and shows a transition from monomers to dimers, with monomers favored at both very low and very high pressures, as well as at high temperatures. In the context of hydrogen, the former region corresponds to hydrogen present in most interstellar gas clouds, while the latter is associated with the long sought-after fluid metallic phase.

Using the Zeno line to assess and refine molecular models.

The Zeno line is the locus of points on the temperature-density plane where the compressibility factor of the fluid is equal to one. It has been observed to be straight for a broad variety of real fluids, although the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. In this work, a detailed study of the Zeno line and its relation to the vapor-liquid coexistence curve is performed for two simple model pair-potential fluids: attractive square-well fluids with varying well-widths λ and Mie n-6 fluids with different repulsive exponents n.

From Atoms to Colloids: Does the Frenkel Line Exist in Discontinuous Potentials?

The Frenkel line has been proposed as a crossover in the fluid region of phase diagrams between a "nonrigid" and a "rigid" fluid. It is generally described as a crossover in the dynamical properties of a material and as such has been described theoretically using a very different set of markers from those with which is it investigated experimentally. In this study, we have performed extensive calculations using two simple yet fundamentally different model systems: hard spheres and square-well potentials.

Tethered hard spheres: A bridge between the fluid and solid phases.

The thermodynamics of hard spheres tethered to a Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattice is investigated using event-driven molecular-dynamics. The particle-particle and the particle-tether collision rates are related to the phase space geometry and are used to study the FCC and fluid states. In tethered systems, the entropy can be determined by at least two routes: (i) through integration of the tether collision rates with the tether length r or (ii) through integration of the particle-particle collision rates with the hard-sphere diameter σ (or, equivalently, the density).