Phase behavior of colloidal suspensions with critical solvents in terms of effective interactions

Abstract

We study the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions the solvents of which are considered to be binary liquid mixtures undergoing phase segregation. We focus on the thermodynamic region close to the critical point of the accompanying miscibility gap. There, due to the colloidal particles acting as cavities in the critical medium, the spatial confinements of the critical fluctuations of the corresponding order parameter result in the effective, so-called critical Casimir forces between the colloids. Employing an approach in terms of effective, one-component colloidal systems, we explore the possibility of phase coexistence between two phases of colloidal suspensions, one being rich and the other being poor in colloidal particles. The reliability of this effective approach is discussed.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Controlling colloidal phase transitions with critical Casimir forces
• Collective behavior of colloids due to critical Casimir interactions
• Nonadditivity of Critical Casimir Forces
• Critical Casimir Forces and Colloidal Phase Transitions in a Near-Critical Solvent : A Simple Model Reveals a Rich Phase Diagram
• Many-body effects for critical Casimir forces
• Critical Casimir forces between homogeneous and chemically striped surfaces
• Alignment of cylindrical colloids near chemically patterned substrates induced by critical Casimir torques
• Critical Casimir Forces for Films with Bulk Ordering Fields
• Revealing polymerization kinetics with colloidal dipatch particles
• Critical Casimir forces along the iso-fields
• Tuning effective interactions close to the critical point in colloidal suspensions
• Liquid bridging of cylindrical colloids in near-critical solvents
• Quantum and Critical Casimir Effects: Bridging Fluctuation Physics and Nanotechnology