Local structure of liquid/vapour interfaces approaching the critical point

Abstract

Investigating the structure of fluid interfaces at high temperatures is a particularly delicate task that requires effective ways of discriminating liquid from vapour and identifying the location of the liquid phase boundary, thereby allowing to distinguish intrinsic from capillary fluctuations. Several numerical approaches require introducing a coarse-graining length scale, often heuristically chosen to be the molecular size, to determine the location of the liquid phase boundary. Here, we propose an alternative rationale for choosing this coarse-graining length scale; we require the average position of the local liquid phase dividing surface to match its flat, macroscopic counterpart. We show that this approach provides additional insight into the structure of the liquid/vapour interface, suggesting the presence of another length scale beyond the bulk correlation one that plays an important role in determining the interface structure.