Entropy density functional theory for inhomogeneous fluids

Abstract: We present an exact variational scheme for the physics of inhomogeneous classical fluids in thermal equilibrium. A joint metadensity minimization principle is proven for the one-body density and the global interparticle distance distribution. The theory bypasses the inhomogeneous two-body density and thus remains computationally simple. A universal excess entropy functional accounts for all many-body correlations in arbitrary pairwise interacting systems. The framework is relevant for neural functional machine learning, for soft matter design, and for predicting structural correlation functions via entropic test-particle and meta-Ornstein-Zernike routes.