Related papers: Polymer induced depletion potentials in polymer-co…
The phase separation that occurs in two-temperature mixtures, which are driven out of equilibrium at the local scale, has been thoroughly characterized, but much less is known about the depletion interactions that drive it. Using numerical…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…
Colloidal suspensions with free polymer coils which are larger than the colloidal particles are considered. The polymer-colloid interaction is modeled by an extension of the Asakura-Oosawa model. Phase separation occurs into dilute and…
Polymer chains in colloid-polymer mixtures can be coarse-grained by replacing them with single soft particles interacting via effective polymer-polymer and polymer-colloid pair potentials. Here we describe in detail how Ornstein-Zernike…
We simulate model systems of charged spherical particles in their counterion solution and measure the thermodynamic pressure and the pair distribution function from which we derive effective potentials of mean force. For a system with only…
We perform simulations to compute the effective potential between the centers-of-mass of two polymers with reversible bonds. We investigate the influence of the topology of the unbonded precursor (linear or ring) and the specific sequence…
A coarse-graining strategy for dilute and semi-dilute solutions of interacting polymers, and of colloid polymer mixtures is briefly described. Monomer degrees of freedom are traced out to derive an effective, state dependent pair potential…
We demonstrate the effect of the depletion force in experiments and simulations of vertically vibrated mixtures of large and small steel spheres. The system exhibits size segregation and a large increase in the pair correlation function of…
We report a detailed study, using state-of-the-art simulation and theoretical methods, of the depletion potential between a pair of big hard spheres immersed in a reservoir of much smaller hard spheres, the size disparity being measured by…
Effective interactions inherently encompass many-body effects that appear unified. Analyzing these in reverse, that is, separating them into contributions from pairs, triples, or larger groups, is typically intricate and seldom pursued.…
We discuss structural correlations in mixtures of free polymer and colloidal particles based on a microscopic, 2-component liquid state integral equation theory. Whereas in the case of polymers much smaller than the spherical particles the…
The number of allowed configurations of a polymer is reduced by the presence of a repulsive surface resulting in an entropic force between them. We develop a method to calculate the entropic force, and detailed pressure distribution, for…
We study theoretically the equilibrium phase behaviour of a mixture of polydisperse hard-sphere colloids and monodisperse polymers, modelled using the Asakura-Oosawa model within the free volume approximation of Lekkerkerker et al. We…
Depletion interactions between colloidal particles dispersed in a fluid medium are effective interactions induced by the presence of other types of colloid. They are not instantaneous but build up in time. We show by means Brownian dynamics…
Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of a phase-separating colloid-polymer mixture are performed and compared to recent experiments. The approach is based on effective interaction potentials in which the central monomers of self-avoiding…
In biomimetic and biological systems, interactions between surfaces are often mediated by adhesive molecules, nanoparticles, or colloids dispersed in the surrounding solution. We present here a general, statistical-mechanical model for two…
We employ effective interaction potentials to study the equilibrium structure and phase behavior of highly asymmetric mixtures of star polymers. We consider in particular the influence of the addition of a component with a small number of…
Using a geometry-based fundamental measure density functional theory, we calculate bulk fluid phase diagrams of colloidal mixtures of vanishingly thin hard circular platelets and hard spheres. We find isotropic-nematic phase separation with…
Computer simulations and theory are used to systematically investigate how the effective force between two big colloidal spheres in a sea of small spheres depends on the basic (big-small and small-small) interactions. The latter are modeled…
We report molecular dynamics simulations of a system of repulsive, polymer-tethered colloidal particles. We use an explicit polymer model to explore how the length and the behavior of the polymer (ideal or self-avoiding) affect the ability…