What do we know that van der Waals did not know?

B. Widom

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 1999, vol. 263, issue 1, 500-515

Abstract: Reference is made to some of the areas in which van der Waals's work in the nineteenth century anticipated modern developments. This includes applications of the mean-field approximation to the study of dense liquids, of critical phenomena in pure and multicomponent fluids, and of higher-order critical points, particularly tricritical points. The main focus of this lecture, though, is on interfacial structure and thermodynamics, where the work of the present author has had its roots in van der Waals's theory of capillarity. Problems treated include those of wetting and line tension in three-phase equilibrium; pre- (or premonitory) wetting and premelting (surface melting) and the associated boundary tension in the interface between bulk phases; and fluctuations in the internal composition of interfaces and three-phase lines.

Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437198005354
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:263:y:1999:i:1:p:500-515

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(98)00535-4

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().