title: Interactions between nanocolloidal particles in polymer solutions: effect of attractive interactions.
abstract: We present a density-functional theory study of nanoparticle interactions in a concentrated polymer solution. The polymers are modeled as freely jointed tangent chains; all nonbonded interactions between polymer segments and nanoparticles are described by Lennard-Jones potentials. We test several recently proposed methods of treating attractive interactions within the density-functional theory framework by comparing theoretical results with recent simulation data. We find that the simple van der Waals approach provides the most accurate results for the polymer-mediated potential of mean force between two dilute nanoparticles. We employ this approach to study nanoparticle interactions as a function of nanoparticle-segment interaction strength and polymer solution density and temperature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22901, USA.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Patel
authors.forename: S A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Egorov