Criticality and phase separation in a two-dimensional binary colloidal fluid induced by the solvent critical behavior

Abstract

We present an experimental and theoretical study of the phase behavior of a binary mixture of colloids with opposite adsorption preferences in a critical solvent. As a result of the attractive and repulsive critical Casimir forces, the critical fluctuations of the solvent lead to a further critical point in the colloidal system, i.e. to a critical colloidal-liquid--colloidal-liquid demixing phase transition which is controlled by the solvent temperature. Our experimental findings are in good agreement with calculations based on a simple approximation for the free energy of the system.

5 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Europhysics Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Critical Casimir forces in colloidal suspensions on chemically patterned surfaces
• Tunability of Critical Casimir Interactions by Boundary Conditions
• Partial Clustering in Binary Two-Dimensional Colloidal Suspensions

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