Related papers: Criticality and phase separation in a two-dimensio…
We investigate the phase behaviour of mixtures of two populations of colloidal particles dispersed in a binary solvent system near its critical composition. The surfaces of particles are chemically modified to elicit a specific solvent…
We study the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions the solvents of which are considered to be binary liquid mixtures undergoing phase segregation. We focus on the thermodynamic region close to the critical point of the accompanying…
If colloidal solute particles are suspended in a solvent close to its critical point, they act as cavities in a fluctuating medium and thereby restrict and modify the fluctuation spectrum in a way which depends on their relative…
Spatial confinement of a near-critical medium changes its fluctuation spectrum and modifies the corresponding order parameter distribution. These effects result in effective, so-called critical Casimir forces (CCFs) acting on the confining…
From experimental studies it is well-known that colloidal particles suspended in a near-critical binary solvent exhibit interesting aggregation phenomena, often associated with colloidal phase transitions, and assumed to be driven by…
The phase behavior of a single type of colloid C suspended in near-critical solvents is known to be very rich. Motivated in part by recent experiments we consider a mixture of two colloidal types C1 and C2 in a binary solvent close to its…
The critical Casimir effect provides a thermodynamic analogue of the well-known quantum mechanical Casimir effect. It acts between two surfaces immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture, and results from the confinement of concentration…
We investigate the behavior of colloidal particles immersed in a binary liquid mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine in the presence of a chemically patterned substrate. Close to the critical point of the mixture, the particles are subjected to…
Colloids immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces (CCFs) because they confine its concentration fluctuations and influence the latter via effective surface fields. To date, CCFs have only been…
Critical Casimir forces can play an important role for applications in nano-science and nanotechnology, owing to their piconewton strength, nanometric action range, fine tunability as a function of temperature, and exquisite dependence on…
We present a numerical study of the effective potential $V_\mathrm{eff}$ between two hard-sphere colloids dispersed in a solvent of interacting particles, for several values of temperature and solvent density, approaching the solvent…
If a fluctuating medium is confined, the ensuing perturbation of its fluctuation spectrum generates Casimir-like effective forces acting on its confining surfaces. Near a continuous phase transition of such a medium the corresponding order…
Within mean field theory, we investigate the bridging transition between a pair of parallel cylindrical colloids immersed in a binary liquid mixture as a solvent which is close to its critical consolute point $T_c$. We determine the…
Recent experiments have measured the critical Casimir force acting on a colloid immersed in a binary liquid mixture near its continuous demixing phase transition and exposed to a chemically structured substrate. Motivated by these…
In soft and condensed matter physics, effective interactions often emerge as a result of the spatial confinement of a fluctuating field. For instance, microscopic particles in a binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces…
Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near their continous demixing phase transition we study the critical behavior of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, for the film geometry with one…
Exploiting the mapping between a binary mixture and the Ising model we have analyzed the critical fluctuations by means of the density-matrix renormalization group technique. The calculations have been carried out for a two-dimensional…
We report a numerical investigation of two colloids immersed in a critical solvent, with the aim of quantifying the effective colloid-colloid interaction potential. By turning on an attraction between the colloid and the solvent particles…
The spatial suppression of order parameter fluctuations in a critical media produces Critical Casimir forces acting on confining surfaces. This scenario is realized in a critical binary mixture near the demixing transition point that…
We study theoretically and experimentally the solvent-mediated critical Casimir force acting on colloidal particles immersed in a binary liquid mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine and close to substrates which are chemically patterned with…