Related papers: Freezing of Polydisperse Hard Spheres
In experimental systems, colloidal particles are virtually always at least somewhat polydisperse, which can have profound effects on their ability to crystallize. Unfortunately, accurately predicting the effects of polydispersity on phase…
The equilibrium phase behaviour of hard spheres with size polydispersity is studied theoretically. We solve numerically the exact phase equilibrium equations that result from accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases,…
The effect of polydispersity on the freezing transition of hard spheres is examined within a moment description. At low polydispersities a single fluid-to-crystal transition is recovered. With increasing polydispersity we find a density…
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…
We calculate the phase behavior of hard spheres with size polydispersity, using accurate free energy expressions for the fluid and solid phases. Cloud and shadow curves, which determine the onset of phase coexistence, are found exactly by…
Polydisperse mixtures are those in which components with a whole range of sizes are present. It is shown that the fluid phase of polydisperse hard spheres is thermodynamically unstable unless the density of large spheres decreases at least…
We describe a simulation method for the accurate study of the equilibrium freezing properties of polydisperse fluids under the experimentally relevant condition of fixed polydispersity. The approach is based on the phase switch Monte Carlo…
We study the interplay between the fluid-crystal transition and the glass transition of elastic sphere system with polydispersity using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is found that the end point of the crystal-fluid…
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…
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…
The phase diagram of soft spheres with size dispersion has been studied by means of an optimized Monte Carlo algorithm which allows to equilibrate below the kinetic glass transition for all sizes distribution. The system ubiquitously…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
A theoretical scheme for the calculation of the full phase diagram (including cloud and shadow curves, binodals and distribution functions of the coexisting phases) for colloid-polymer mixtures with polymer chain length polydispersity and…
The statistical mechanics of phase transitions in dense systems of polydisperse particles presents distinctive challenges to computer simulation and analytical theory alike. The core difficulty, namely dealing correctly with particle size…
We consider the consequences of keeping the total surface fixed for a polydisperse system of $N$ hard spheres. In contrast with a similar model (J. Zhang {\it et al.}, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 110}, 5318 (1999)), the Percus-Yevick and Mansoori…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
It has been shown by Stell [J. Stat. Phys. 63, 1203 (1991)] that at low temperature monodisperse sticky spheres collapse to form coexisting close-packed solid and infinitely dilute gases. We show that polydisperse sticky spheres also…
Many materials containing colloids or polymers are polydisperse: They comprise particles with properties (such as particle diameter, charge, or polymer chain length) that depend continuously on one or several parameters. This review…