Superadiabatic Dynamical Density Functional Theory for One-Dimensional Brownian Hard-Rod Fluids

Abstract: We study the relaxation dynamics of a one-dimensional system of hard rods at the level of one-body fields using superadiabatic dynamical density functional theory, and compare the results with Brownian dynamics simulations. The theory uses the exact equilibrium excess free energy functional and incorporates superadiabatic effects from first principles via an adiabatic closure relation at the three-particle level. The predicted superadiabatic response shows very good agreement with simulation data, provided that initial-state ensemble differences between theory and simulations remain small. Furthermore, we evaluate an approximate power functional theory based on a velocity-gradient expansion, which also yields an accurate superadiabatic response, although requiring a memory kernel extracted from simulation data.