Bending and Gaussian rigidities of confined soft spheres from second-order virial series.

Abstract

We use virial series to study the equilibrium properties of confined soft-spheres fluids interacting through the inverse-power potentials. The confinement is induced by hard walls with planar, spherical, and cylindrical shapes. We evaluate analytically the coefficients of order two in density of the wall-fluid surface tension γ and analyze the curvature contributions to the free energy. Emphasis is in bending and Gaussian rigidities, which are found analytically at order two in density. Their contribution to γ(R) and the accuracy of different truncation procedures to the low curvature expansion are discussed. Finally, several universal relations that apply to low-density fluids are analyzed.