Orientational order in high density dipolar hard sphere fluids

Abstract

Taking advantage of recent estimates, by one of us, of the critical temperature of the isotropic-ferroelectric transition of high density dipolar hard spheres, we performed new Monte Carlo simulations in the close vicinity of these estimates and applied histogram reweighting methods to obtain refined values of the critical temperatures from the crossing of the fourth-order cumulant for different system sizes. The ferroelectric line is determined in the density range ρ*=0.80–0.95, and the onset of columnar ordering is located.