2025/01/22 by Martin Horsch, Horsch, Martin Thomas
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Materials Science · #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Surface Modification and Superhydrophobicity #nanoparticles nucleation surface interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.12755
openalex publication_date 2025/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This work addresses four problems in defining and computing the surface tension of vapour-liquid interfaces: (1) The apparent kinetic contribution to the surface tension, and what it is that makes it appear; (2) the problem of defining the local virial, which for some purposes appears to be necessary; (3) the disagreement between results for spherical interfaces when using different methods, specifically the virial and the test area method; (4) how the surface tension values obtained from these methods can be related to the definition of the surface tension from thermodynamics - since if they cannot, it is a meaningless exercise to compute them. At the end, all these problems remain unsolved: They are "open questions."