Playing with Marbles: Structural and Thermodynamic Properties of Hard-Sphere Systems

These lecture notes present an overview of equilibrium statistical mechanics of classical fluids, with special applications to the structural and thermodynamic properties of systems made of particles interacting via the hard-sphere potential or closely related model potentials. The exact statistical-mechanical properties of one-dimensional systems, the issue of thermodynamic (in)consistency among different routes in the context of several approximate theories, and the construction of analytical or semi-analytical approximations for the structural properties are also addressed.