Pressure of the hard-sphere solid

Abstract

The pressure of the face-centered cubic hard-sphere crystal is analyzed using two different density functional theories: the generalized effective liquid approximation and the modified weighted density approximation. It is shown that in both theories the dominant contribution originates from the ideal part of the variational free energy. It is argued that in the region near close packing, reliable results can only be obtained by using the real-space version of these theories.