Related papers: Polydispersity Effects in Colloid-Polymer Mixtures
We conduct molecular dynamics computer simulations of a system of Lennard-Jones particles, polydisperse in both size and mass, at a fixed density and temperature. We test for and quantify systematic changes in dynamical properties that…
We investigate the effect of polydispersity on fluctuation-induced interactions between colloids trapped at a fluid interface. Using the scattering-matrix formalism, we calculate the interaction energy in two- and three-body systems under…
We describe how Monte Carlo simulation within the grand canonical ensemble can be applied to the study of phase behaviour in polydisperse fluids. Attention is focused on the case of fixed polydispersity in which the form of the `parent'…
The width of the distribution of species in a polydisperse system is employed in a small-variable expansion, to obtain a well-controlled and compact scheme by which to calculate phase equilibria in multi-phase systems. General and universal…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…
Size-polydisperse liquids have become standard models for avoiding crystallization, thereby enabling studies of supercooled liquids and glasses formed, e.g., by colloidal systems. Purely \textit{energy} polydisperse liquids have been…
We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…
Understanding the phase behaviour of mixtures continues to pose challenges, even for systems that might be considered "simple". Here we consider a very simple mixture of two colloidal and one non-adsorbing polymer species which can be…
The solid-solid coexistence of a polydisperse hard sphere system is studied by using the Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that for large enough polydispersity the solid-solid coexistence state is more stable than the single-phase…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
By means of classical density functional theory and its dynamical extension, we consider a colloidal fluid with spherically-symmetric competing interactions, which are well known to exhibit a rich bulk phase behavior. This includes complex…
This paper compares theory and experiment for the kinetics of time-dependent sedimentation. We discuss non-interacting suspensions and colloids which may exhibit behavior similar to the one-dimensional motion of compressible gas. The…
We dynamically simulate fractionation (partitioning of particle species) during spinodal gas-liquid separation of a size-polydisperse colloid, using polydispersity up to ~40% and a skewed parent size distribution. We introduce a novel…
We present dynamical density functional theory results for the time evolution of the density distribution of a sedimenting model two-dimensional binary mixture of colloids. The interplay between the bulk phase behaviour of the mixture, its…
We use confocal microscopy to image colloidal gels formed from highly polydisperse particles. We suspend our polydisperse particles in a density matched solvent, and let the particles spontaneously aggregate through the van der Waals force.…
Hard spheres with a polydispersity above approximately 8% are shown to crystallise into two phase-separated solid phases. A polydispersity above 8% is too large to be tolerated by a single solid phase but phase separation produces two…
We investigate polydispersity effects on the average structure factor of colloidal suspensions of neutral particles with surface adhesion. A sticky hard sphere model alternative to Baxter's one is considered. The choice of factorizable…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…