Self-consistent treatment of repulsive and attractive forces in nonuniform liquids.

Structural and thermodynamic properties of a nonuniform liquid are related to those of a reference fluid with purely repulsive intermolecular forces in an external field. A new equation for that field derived from the Yvon-Born-Green hierarchy permits a self-consistent description of correlations induced by the exact repulsive forces and a mean field treatment of the attractive forces. Predictions of the theory for drying effects at repulsive walls and for the liquid-vapor interface are compared to molecular dynamics simulations.