A stringent test of the accuracy of empirical force fields
is reproducing
the phase diagram of bulk phases and mixtures. Exploring the phase
diagram of mixtures requires the detection of phase boundaries and
critical points. In contrast to most solid–liquid transitions,
in which a global order parameter (average density) can be used to
discriminate between two phases, some demixing transitions entail
relatively subtle changes in the local environment of each molecule.
In such cases, finite sampling errors and finite-size effects make
the identification of trends in local order parameters extremely challenging.
Here we analyze one such example, namely a methanol/hexane mixture,
and compute several local and global structural properties. We simulate
the system at various temperatures and study the structural changes
associated with demixing. We show that despite a seemingly continuous
transformation between mixed and demixed states, the topological properties
of the H-bond network change abruptly as the system crosses the demixing
line. In particular, by using spectral clustering, we show that the
distribution of cluster sizes develops a fat tail (as expected from
percolation theory) in the vicinity of the critical point. We illustrate
a simple criterion to identify this behavior, which results from the
emergence of large system-spanning clusters from a collection of aggregates.
We further tested the spectral clustering analysis on a Lennard–Jones
system as a standard example of a system with no H-bonds, and also,
in this case, we were able to detect the demixing transition.