Evaluation of Liquid Structure Data

Abstract

A procedure for assessing the overall accuracy of liquid structure factor data is examined. The method makes use of the requirement that the two particle correlation function and its derivative vanish for separations smaller than the size of an atom. A series of numerical experiments, designed to evaluate this procedure, are discussed and a calibration of the method based on these experiments is presented. The method is sensitive when the over‐all uncertainties in the data are smaller than 1%. Since this is just the level which is now being achieved in liquid structure measurements, the method should be quite useful in the evaluation of liquid structure data. As an illustration, the method is applied to recently published data for liquid neon and liquid gallium.