Soft mean spherical approximation for dusty plasma liquids: Level of accuracy and analytic expressions

The soft mean spherical approximation is employed for the study of the thermodynamics of dusty plasma liquids, the latter treated as Yukawa one-component plasmas. Within this integral theory method, the only input necessary for the calculation of the reduced excess energy stems from the solution of a single non-linear algebraic equation. Consequently, thermodynamic quantities can be routinely computed without the need to determine the pair correlation function or the structure factor. The level of accuracy of the approach is quantified after an extensive comparison with numerical simulation results. The approach is solved over a million times with input spanning the whole parameter space and reliable analytic expressions are obtained for the basic thermodynamic quantities. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.