Issue |
Europhys. Lett.
Volume 58, Number 1, April 2002
|
|
---|---|---|
Page(s) | 133 - 139 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary physics and related areas of science and technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/epl/i2002-00615-y | |
Published online | 01 August 2002 |
Star-polymers as depleting agents of colloidal hard spheres
Institut für Theoretische Physik II,
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Universitätsstraße 1, D-40225
Düsseldorf, Germany
Received:
12
October
2001
Accepted:
17
January
2002
We examine the phase behavior of star-polymer–colloid mixtures for star-to-colloid size ratios smaller than unity, by employing recently derived effective interactions between the constituent particles. Tuning the arm number of the star-polymers provides a natural bridge between the well-known borderline models of colloid-polymer and binary hard-sphere mixtures. By canonically tracing out the star-polymers, we derive accurate effective depletion potentials between the colloids and examine the stability of the demixing transition with respect to the crystallization of the colloids. We find that the former is metastable with respect to freezing for arm numbers at all size ratios.
PACS: 82.70.-y – Disperse systems; complex fluids / 82.70.Dd – Colloids / 61.20.-p – Structure of liquids
© EDP Sciences, 2002
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