Excess free energy of supercooled liquids at disordered walls

Abstract

Using a novel thermodynamic integration scheme, we compute the excess free energy, $\gamma$, of a glass-forming, binary Lennard-Jones liquid in contact with a frozen amorphous wall, formed by particles frozen into a similar structure as the liquid. We find that $\gamma$ is non-zero, becoming negative at low temperature. This indicates that the thermodynamics of the system is perturbed by the effect of the amorphous wall.