Fundamental-measure density functional for mixtures of parallel hard cylinders.

We obtain a fundamental-measure density functional for mixtures of parallel hard cylinders. For this purpose we first generalize to multicomponent mixtures the fundamental-measure functional proposed by Tarazona and Rosenfeld for a one-component hard disk fluid, through a method alternative to the cavity formalism of those authors. We show the equivalence of both methods when applied to two-dimensional fluids. The density functional so obtained reduces to the exact density functional for one-dimensional mixtures of hard rods when applied to one-dimensional profiles. In a second step, we apply an idea put forward some time ago by two of us, based again on a dimensional reduction of the system, and derive a density functional for mixtures of parallel hard cylinders. We explore some features of this functional by determining the fluid-fluid demixing spinodals for a binary mixture of cylinders with the same volume, and by calculating the direct correlation functions.