Event-driven Langevin simulations of hard spheres

The blossoming of interest in colloids and nanoparticles has given renewed impulse to the study of hard-body systems. In particular, hard spheres have become a real test system for theories and experiments. It is therefore necessary to study the complex dynamics of such systems in presence of a solvent; disregarding hydrodynamic interactions, the simplest model is the Langevin equation. Unfortunately, standard algorithms for the numerical integration of the Langevin equation require that interactions are slowly varying during an integration time step. This is not the case for hard-body systems, where there is no clear-cut distinction between the correlation time of the noise and the time scale of the interactions. Starting first from a splitting of the Fokker-Plank operator associated with the Langevin dynamics, and then from an approximation of the two-body Green's function, we introduce and test two algorithms for the simulation of the Langevin dynamics of hard spheres.