title: Evaluation of phenomenological one-phase criteria for the melting and freezing of softly repulsive particles.
abstract: We test the validity of some widely used phenomenological criteria for the localization of the fluid-solid transition thresholds against the phase diagrams of particles interacting through the exp-6, inverse-power-law, and Gaussian potentials. We find that one-phase rules give, on the whole, reliable estimates of freezing/melting points. The agreement is ordinarily better for a face-centered-cubic solid than for a body-centered-cubic crystal, even more so in the presence of a pressure-driven reentrant transition of the solid into a denser fluid phase, as found in the Gaussian-core model.
authors.affiliation: Istituto per i Processi Chimico-Fisici del CNR, Sezione di Messina, Via La Farina 237, 98123 Messina, Italy. saija@me.cnr.it
authors.forename: Franz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Saija
authors.forename: Santi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Prestipino
authors.forename: Paolo V
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Giaquinta