An Entropic Approach To Classical Density Functional Theory

Ahmad Yousefi, Ariel Caticha

Published 2021-08-03Version 1

The classical Density Functional Theory (DFT) is introduced as an application of entropic inference for inhomogeneous fluids at thermal equilibrium. It is shown that entropic inference reproduces the variational principle of DFT when information about expected density of particles is imposed. This process introduces an intermediate family of trial density-parametrized probability distributions, and consequently an intermediate entropy, from which the preferred one is found using the method of Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt). As an application, the DFT model for slowly varying density is provided, and its approximation scheme is discussed.