Phase coexistance in polydisperse mixture of hard-sphere colloidal and flexible chain parti.pdf

a r X i v : 0 7 0 5 .1 3 4 9 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .s o f t ] 9 M a y 2 0 0 7 epl draft Phase coexistence in polydisperse mixture of hard-sphere colloidal and flexible chain particles Yurij V. Kalyuzhnyi1 and Peter T. Cummings2 1 Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, Svientsitskoho 1, 79011 Lviv, Ukraine 2 Department of Chemical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235-1604, USA and Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 27831-6110, USA PACS 64.10.+h – First pacs description PACS 64.70.Fx – Second pacs description PACS 82.70.Dd – Third pacs description Abstract. - 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 hard-sphere colloidal and poly- meric monomer sizes polydispersity is proposed. The scheme combines thermodynamic pertur- bation theory for associating fluids and recently developed method used to determine the phase diagram of polydisperse spherical shape colloidal fluids (L.Bellier-Castella et al., J.Chem.Phys. 113, 8337(2000)). By way of illustration we present and discuss the full phase diagram for the mixture with polydispersity in the size of the hard-sphere colloidal particles. Introduction. – Since the pioneering studies of Asakura and Oosawa [1,2] and Vrij [3] substantial amount of efforts have been focused on the development of the theoretical methods describing the phase behavior of the athermal colloid-polymer mixtures (see Refs. [4–6] and references therein). Usually in the vast majority of the theories developed so far interaction between polymers is either ignored or treated using approximations differ- ent from those assumed to describe polymer-colloid and colloid-colloid interactions. This feature imposes certain restrictions on the possibilities of the theory, for exam- ple the theories, which i