Factsheet for Tutorial 2 Statistical Mechanics, Algorithms and Computations

Virial expansion for the partition function of hard disks

Settings
System:
N disks of radius in a square of side L and surface V = L2 .
Density:
occupied surface N 2
= = (1)
total surface L2
Probability distribution (not normalized) of the centers (x0 , . . . , xN 1 ) of the disks:

1 if there is no overlap between disks
(x0 , . . . , xN 1 ) = (2)
0 otherwise

Partition function at density

Z
Z() = dx0 . . . dxN 1 (x0 , . . . , xN 1 ) (3)

Expansion of the partition function

Rewriting of Z() with the non-overlapping constraint made explicit:
Z
    
Z() = dx0 . . . dxN 1 1 (x0 , x1 ) 1 (x0 , x2 ) . . . 1 (xN 2 , xN 1 ) (4)
| {z }
1
2
N (N 1) factors

The integral runs over the 2N individual coordinates, each of them running on [0, L].
Indicator function: 
1 if dist(xk , xl ) < 2
(xk , xl ) = (5)
0 otherwise
0th order term of the expansion of the product of [ . . . ]s in (4):
Z
dx0 . . . xN 1 = Z(0) = V N (6)

1st order terms of this expansion all include an integral of the form:
Z Z
dxk dxl (xk , xl ) = V dxk (xk , xl ) = V 4 2 (7)
| {z }
volume ot the
excluded region for xk

Gathering the term of 0th order and those of 1st order [there are 12 N (N 1) of those]:
R
(7) other integrals than the dxk dxl of (7)
1 z }| { z }| {
Z() = V N N (N 1) V 4 2 V N 2 (8)
2
N
 N (N 1) 
=V 1 4 2 + ... (9)
2V 
N

' V exp 2(N 1) (10)
|{z} | {z }
Z(0) paccept ()

1
Taking the logarithm:
log Z() = N log V 2(N 1) + . . . (11)
Differentiating with respect to the volume V :

log Z() N 1
= + 2N (N 1) 2 2 + . . . (12)
V V V
Multiplying by V /N :
V log Z() 1
= 1 + 2(N 1) 2 + . . . (13)
N V V

The expansion to higher order, corresponding to products of two s, three s, etc., when
expanding the product of [ . . . ]s in (4), takes the form:

V log Z() 1 1 1
= 1 + 2(N 1) 2 + (...) 2 + (...) 3 + . . . (14)
N V V V V