Structure and effective interactions in multi-component hard-sphere liquids: the fundamental-measure density functional approach

Non-crystalline solids often emerge from melts with at least three atomic constituents. The study of packing aspects of melts that form glasses or quasi-crystals by investigating effective interactions in multi-component hardsphere liquids is made possible by the geometrically based fundamental-measure density functional theory. It provides analytical approximations for the partial structure factors of the general m-component hard-sphere mixture (e.g. the Percus-Yevick approximation), and an accurate solution of the inverse scattering problem for obtaining the effective interactions. The fundamental-measure theory also enables one to extend such studies to more general (soft) interactions.