A state of equilibrium means that the thermophysical properties must be equal no matter where a measurement is performed in a system. However, some recent studies reported that there exists the temperature difference over a liquid-vapor interface even...
A state of equilibrium means that the thermophysical properties must be equal no matter where a measurement is performed in a system. However, some recent studies reported that there exists the temperature difference over a liquid-vapor interface even though the system is at a state of equilibrium when a system reduces to a nanoscalesize. Those conclusions leave a strong question as to whether the definition of a thermal equilibrium state should be changed in the case of nanoscale systems. In the present study, we carefully investigated the temperature profile over a liquid-vapor interface using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation and found that the temperature difference between a liquid phase and a vapor phase over an interface resulted from the methodological difference of the temperature calculation. That is, the definition of a thermal equilibrium state has no reason to be changed no matter how a system would be small.