Free energy landscapes for a small number of hard disks*

We present our analysis on the free energy landscapes of a small number of simulated particles undergoing a 2D random walk inside of a circular corral. This follows up on previous work by members of our research group who simulated both 3 and 4 particles under similar conditions. Those studies showed that parameters could be defined such that 1 or 2 dimensional free energy landscapes could be constructed in order to help understand the barriers to re-arrangement and the timescales on which they happen. In particular, we are interested in how these barriers change as the particles become more confined by reducing the size of the corral. Our simulations increase the number of particles simulated to 5 and higher with the goal of generalizing the processes for defining parameters that give rise to low dimensional energy landscapes. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand configurational changes on a small scale in order to give insight into glassy dynamics for much larger systems.