Entropic wetting and many-body induced layering in a model colloid-polymer mixture.
We develop an efficient simulation scheme to study a model suspension of equally sized colloidal hard spheres and nonadsorbing ideal polymer coils, both in bulk and adsorbed against a planar hard wall. The many-body character of the polymer-mediated effective interactions between the colloids yields a bulk phase diagram and adsorption phenomena that differ substantially from those found for pairwise simple fluids; e.g., we find an anomalously large bulk liquid regime and, far from the bulk triple point, three layering transitions in the partial wetting regime prior to a transition to complete wetting by colloidal liquid.
Dijkstra
Marjolein
M
Debye Institute, Utrecht University, Princetonpln 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
van Roij
René
R