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Fluid demixing in colloid-polymer mixtures:
Influence of polymer interactions M. Schmidt, A. R. Denton, and J. M. Brader, J. Chem. Phys. 118, 1541 (2003). Locate in [bare] [illustrated] list. Get [full paper] as pdf. Abstract. We consider a binary mixture of hard colloidal spheres and nonadsorbing polymer coils. The polymers are regarded as effective spheres that interact with one another via a repulsive step-function pair potential and with colloids solely via excluded volume. The system is treated with a geometry-based density functional theory based on the exact zero-dimensional limit of the model. For bulk fluid phases, we calculate demixing binodals and find that with increasing strength of polymer-polymer interaction the coexisting colloidal liquid vapor phase becomes more concentrated dilute in polymer. In contrast to a simple mean-field like perturbative density functional, our approach yields good agreement with an experimental demixing phase diagram. [figures] Read the [full paper] as pdf. |