Reentrant spinodals and the Speedy scenario in colloidal model systems
Abstract
A re-entrant gas-liquid spinodal was proposed as a possible explanation of the apparent divergence of the compressibility and specific heat on supercooling water. Such a counter intuitive possibility, e.g. a liquid that becomes unstable to gas-like fluctuations on cooling at positive pressure, has never been observed, neither in real substances nor in off-lattice simulations. More recently, such re-entrant scenario has been dismissed on the premise that the re-entrant spinodal would collide with the gas-liquid binodal in the pressure-temperature plane. Here we study, numerically and analytically, two previously introduced one-component patchy particle models that both show (i) a re-entrant spinodal and (ii) a re-entrant binodal, providing a neat in silico (and in charta) realization of such unconventional thermodynamic scenario.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.03048,
title = {Reentrant spinodals and the Speedy scenario in colloidal model systems},
author = {Lorenzo Rovigatti and Valentino Bianco and José Maria Tavares and Francesco Sciortino},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.03048},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages, 5 figures