Bulk and wetting phenomena in a colloidal mixture of hard spheres and platelets.
Density functional theory is used to study binary colloidal fluids consisting of hard spheres and thin platelets in their bulk and near a planar hard wall. This system exhibits liquid-liquid coexistence of a phase that is rich in spheres (poor in platelets) and a phase that is poor in spheres (rich in platelets). For the mixture near a planar hard wall, we find that the phase rich in spheres wets the wall completely upon approaching the liquid demixing binodal from the sphere-poor phase, provided the concentration of the platelets is smaller than a threshold value which marks a first-order wetting transition at coexistence. No layering transitions are found, in contrast to recent studies on binary mixtures of spheres and nonadsorbing polymers or thin hard rods.
Harnau
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Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung, Heisenbergstrasse 3, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
Dietrich
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