Calculation of the surface tension of liquid metals using a one-component-plasma reference system

The authors use the one-component-plasma (OCP) model as a reference system instead of the traditional hard-sphere fluid to calculate the liquid-vapour interfacial surface tension of liquid metals within the density functional formalism. The calculated surface tensions of the alkali metals are in excellent agreement with experiment. For the polyvalent metal Al, the result the authors obtain is larger than experimental measurements. They conclude that the OCP system is not suitable to describe the liquid-vapour phase transition in simple metals which have a nominal plasma parameter Gamma -Z²e ²/ak_BT larger than the usual freezing value of approximately 178. The calculated interfacial widths in all cases are narrower than the expected experimental values.