English

Percolation of functionalized colloids on patterned substrates

Soft Condensed Matter 2018-03-02 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

We study the percolation properties for a system of functionalized colloids on patterned substrates via Monte Carlo simulations. The colloidal particles are modeled as hard disks with three equally-distributed attractive patches on their perimeter. We describe the patterns on the substrate as circular potential wells of radius RpR_p arranged in a regular square or hexagonal lattice. We find a nonmonotonic behavior of the percolation threshold (packing fraction) as a function of RpR_p. For attractive wells, the percolation threshold is higher than the one for clean (non-patterned) substrates if the circular wells are non-overlapping and can only be lower if the wells overlap. For repulsive wells we find the opposite behavior. In addition, at high packing fractions the formation of both structural and bond defects suppress percolation. As a result, the percolation diagram is reentrant with the non-percolated state occurring at very low and intermediate densities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.00011,
  title  = {Percolation of functionalized colloids on patterned substrates},
  author = {Lucas L. Treffenstädt and Nuno A. M. Araújo and Daniel de las Heras},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.00011},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:37:13.405Z