Generalized van der Waals theories and the asymptotic form of the density profile of a liquid-vapor interface

Abstract

Generalized van der Waals theories for the free energy and density profile of an inhomogeneous fluid are used to obtain an expression for the tails of the density profile of a liquid-vapor interface of an argon-like fluid. We find that the density profile decays asymptotically into the bulk regions as the inverse cubed power of the distance from the center of the interface. We estimate the effect to be too small to be quantitatively significant. © 1982 American Institute of Physics.