Sutherland potential

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The Sutherland potential ^[1]^[2] is given by

\[ \Phi_{12}\left( r \right) = \left\{ \begin{array}{lll} \infty & ; & r \leq \sigma \\ - \epsilon\left( \frac{ \sigma }{r}\right)^{\gamma} & ; & r > \sigma \end{array} \right. \]

where \( \Phi_{12}\left( r \right) \) is the intermolecular pair potential, \(r := |\mathbf{r}_1 - \mathbf{r}_2|\) is the distance between site 1 and site 2, \( \sigma \) is the radius of the central hard core, \( \epsilon \) is the energy well depth (\( \epsilon > 0 \)), and \( \gamma \) is a parameter that controls the interaction range. For example, for \(\gamma=6\) the potential look like