Communication: Virial coefficients and demixing in highly asymmetric binary additive hard-sphere mixtures

Abstract

The problem of demixing in a binary fluid mixture of highly asymmetric additive hard spheres is revisited. A comparison is presented between the results derived previously using truncated virial expansions for three finite size ratios with those that one obtains with the same approach in the extreme case in which one of the components consists of point particles. Since this latter system is known not to exhibit fluid-fluid segregation, the similarity observed for the behavior of the critical constants arising in the truncated series in all instances, while not being conclusive, may cast serious doubts as to the actual existence of a demixing fluid-fluid transition in disparate-sized binary additive hard-sphere mixtures.

3 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (3)

• Depletion potentials in highly size-asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures: Comparison of accurate simulation results with theory
• Class of consistent fundamental-measure free energies for hard-sphere mixtures
• Demixing can occur in binary hard-sphere mixtures with negative non-additivity

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Colloidal Hard Spheres: Triumphs, Challenges and Mysteries
• Bridging and depletion mechanisms in colloid-colloid effective interactions: A reentrant phase diagram
• Three-body interactions in complex fluids: virial coefficients from simulation finite-size effects
• Virial coefficients and demixing in the Asakura-Oosawa model
• Monte Carlo methods for estimating depletion potentials in highly size-asymmetrical hard sphere mixtures
• Critical point for de-mixing of binary hard spheres