Soft sphere potential

The soft sphere potential is defined as

$\Phi _{12}\left(r\right)=\left\{{\begin{array}{lll}\epsilon \left({\frac {\sigma }{r}}\right)^{n}&;&r\leq \sigma \\0&;&r>\sigma \end{array}}\right.$

where $\Phi _{12}\left(r\right)$ is the intermolecular pair potential between two soft spheres separated by a distance Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle r := |\mathbf{r}_1 - \mathbf{r}_2|} , Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \epsilon } is the interaction strength and Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \sigma } is the diameter of the sphere. Frequently the value of Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n} is taken to be 12, thus the model effectively becomes the high temperature limit of the Lennard-Jones model .