The van der Waals limit for classical systems. I. A variational principle

We consider the thermodynamic pressurep(, ) of a classical system of particles with the two-body interaction potentialq(r)+ ^v K(r), where is the number of space dimensions, is a positive parameter, and is the chemical potential. The temperature is not shown in the notation. We prove rigorously, for hard-core potentialsq(r) and for a very general class of functionsK(s), that the limit 0 of the pressurep(, ) exists and is given by where the limit and the supremum can be interchanged. Here is a certain class of nonnegative, Riemann integrable functions,D is a cube of volume |D|, anda ⁰() is the free energy density of a system withK=0 and density . A similar result is proved for the free energy.