Characterizing ordering in liquids: An information theoretic approach

The determination of special molecular arrangements in disordered phases such as liquids is inherently difficult due to its lack of periodicity, in contrast to the crystalline solids. We have already settled a general method to study molecular liquids capable to unveil the details of the molecular ordering from small molecules to systems as big as a protein. However it would be desirable to extract some general features of a liquid phase without going into such details. In this work we propose a method to achieve this challenge by analyzing the probability distributions describing position and orientational molecular ordering within the framework of information theory. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.