A combination of fundamental measure density functional theory and Monte Carlo computer simulation is used to determine the orientation-resolved interfacial tension and stiffness for the equilibrium hard-sphere crystal-fluid interface. Microscopic density functional theory is in quantitative agreement with simulations and predicts a tension of 0.66 kT/\sigma^2 with a small anisotropy of about 0.025 kT and stiffnesses with e.g. 0.53 kT/\sigma^2 for the (001) orientation and 1.03 kT/\sigma^2 for the (111) orientation. Here kT is denoting the thermal energy and \sigma the hard sphere diameter. We compare our results with existing experimental findings.
@article{arxiv.1203.2857,
title = {Tension and stiffness of the hard sphere crystal-fluid interface},
author = {Andreas Härtel and Martin Oettel and Roberto E. Rozas and Stefan U. Egelhaaf and Jürgen Horbach and Hartmut Löwen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.2857},
year = {2012}
}