Computation of the solid-liquid interfacial free energy in hard spheres by means of thermodynamic integration

Abstract

We used a thermodynamic integration scheme, which is specifically designed for disordered systems, to compute the interfacial free energy of the solid-liquid interface in the hard-sphere model. We separated the bulk contribution to the total free energy from the interface contribution, performed a finite-size scaling analysis and obtained for the (100)-interface $\gamma=0.591(11)k_{B}T\sigma^{-2}$.