Extraction of the Solvation Structure on a Solid Plate from a force curve measured by Surface Force Apparatus in a hard-sphere fluid

Abstract

We propose a method of transformation from a force curve obtained with a surface force apparatus (SFA) to a density distribution of a liquid near a surface. The method is based on the statistical mechanics of liquids. As a first step, we show the method for a rigid system in which two cylinders are immersed in a hard-sphere fluid as the force probes. We found that the method works well, especially in the lower density solvent. The accuracy of the transformed result increases as the distance between the circular surface of the cylinder and the solvent sphere increases.