Effective shape and phase behaviour of short charged rods

Abstract

We explicitly calculate the orientation-dependent second virial coefficient of short charged rods in an electrolytic solvent, assuming the rod-rod interactions to be a pairwise sum of hard-core and segmental screened-Coulomb repulsions. From the parallel and isotropically averaged second virial coefficient, we calculate the effective length and diameter of the rods, for charges and screening lengths that vary over several orders of magnitude. Using these effective dimensions, we determine the phase diagram, where we distinguish a low-charge and strong-screening regime with a liquid crystalline nematic and smectic phase, and a high-charge and weak-screening regime with a plastic crystal phase in the phase diagram.

17 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Density functional theory for colloidal mixtures of hard platelets, rods, and spheres
• Novel crystal phase in suspensions of hard ellipsoids
• Fundamental measure theory for mixtures of parallel hard cubes. II. Phase behavior of the one-component fluid and of the binary mixture
• Interaction between charged anisotropic macromolecules: Application to rod-like polyelectrolytes

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Phase behavior of ionic liquid crystals
• Phase diagrams of charged colloidal rods: can a uniaxial charge distribution break chiral symmetry?
• Generalized Onsager theory for strongly anisometric patchy colloids
• Nemato-elasticity of hybrid molecular-colloidal liquid crystals
• Screened Coulomb interactions of general macroions with nonzero particle volume