In small confined systems predictions for the melting point strongly depend on the choice of quantity and on the way it is computed, even yielding divergent and ambiguous results. We present a very simple quantity which allows to control these problems -- the variance of the block averaged interparticle distance fluctuations.
@article{arxiv.0711.1124,
title = {Melting of trapped few particle systems},
author = {J. Böning and A. Filinov and P. Ludwig and H. Baumgartner and M. Bonitz and Yu. E. Lozovik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0711.1124},
year = {2008}
}