Communication: Re-entrant limits of stability of the liquid phase and the Speedy scenario in colloidal model systems.
A re-entrant gas-liquid spinodal was proposed as a possible explanation of the apparent divergence of the compressibility and specific heat off supercooling water. Such a counter-intuitive possibility, e.g., a liquid that becomes unstable to gas-like fluctuations on cooling at positive pressure, has never been observed, neither in real substances nor in off-lattice simulations. More recently, such a re-entrant scenario has been dismissed on the premise that the re-entrant spinodal would collide with the gas-liquid coexisting curve (binodal) in the pressure-temperature plane. Here we study, numerically and analytically, two previously introduced one-component patchy particle models that both show (i) a re-entrant limit of stability of the liquid phase and (ii) a re-entrant binodal, providing a neat in silico (and in charta) realization of such unconventional thermodynamic scenario.
Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3NP, United Kingdom.
Lorenzo
0000000150172829
L
Rovigatti
Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Boltzmanngasse 5, A-1090 Vienna, Austria.
Valentino
0000000338446406
V
Bianco
Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa-ISEL, Rua Conselheiro Emídio Navarro 1, P-1950-062 Lisbon, Portugal and Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, P-1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal.
José Maria
JM
Tavares
Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza-Universitá di Roma, Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy and Istituto Sistemi Complessi (CNR-ISC), Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma, Italy.
Francesco
F
Sciortino