Gas-solid coexistence of adhesive spheres.

The Baxter limit of adhesive spheres is often deemed an unphysical model for liquids due to the thermodynamic metastability of its disordered phases with respect to crystal formation. In this note we use basic free energy considerations to suggest conditions under which the disordered phases are actually stable with respect to the solid for narrow attractive interactions down to the Baxter limit. Possible realizations are then briefly discussed. We consider the original Baxter adhesive sphere model, i.e., a three-dimensional except where explicitly mentioned square-well fluid with well depth and well width , where the hard-core diameter is set to unity for convenience. The second virial coefficient is then B2 /B2 =1− 1/4 , where B2 =2 /3 is the hard-sphere HS value. The stickiness is a temperaturelike quantity defined as