Critical Casimir forces and colloidal aggregation: A numerical study

Abstract

We present a numerical study of the effective potential $V_{\mathrm{eff}}$ between two hard-sphere colloids dispersed in a solvent of interacting particles, for several values of temperature and solvent density, approaching the solvent gas-liquid critical point. We investigate the stability of a system of particles interacting via $V_{\mathrm{eff}}$ to evaluate the locus of colloidal aggregation in the solvent phase-diagram, and its dependence on the colloid size. We assess how the excluded volume depletion forces are modified by solvent attraction and discuss under which conditions solvent critical fluctuations, in the form of critical Casimir forces, can be used to effectively manipulate colloidal aggregation.

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Phase behavior of colloidal suspensions with critical solvents in terms of effective interactions
• How soft repulsion enhances the depletion mechanism
• Properties of patchy colloidal particles close to a surface: a Monte Carlo and density functional study
• Dynamics of colloidal aggregation in microgravity by critical Casimir forces
• Tuning effective interactions close to the critical point in colloidal suspensions
• Depletion force in the infinite-dilution limit in a solvent of nonadditive hard spheres
• Binding branched and linear DNA structures: from isolated clusters to fully bonded gels
• Sign change in the net force in sphere-plate and sphere-sphere systems immersed in nonpolar critical fluid due to the interplay between the critical Casimir and dispersion van der Waals forces
• Solvent mediated forces in critical fluids
• Effective potentials induced by mixtures of patchy and hard co-solutes
• The square lattice Ising model on the rectangle III: Hankel and Toeplitz determinants
• Discontinuous change from thermally- to geometrically- dominated effective interactions in colloidal solutions