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.