Effective one-body interactions due to the presence of a liquid-vapor interface
arXiv:2608.09375 · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2025.130686
Abstract
In this study we investigate the behavior of additive binary square-well mixtures within the framework of classical density functional theory. By leveraging on the geometrical structure of the square-well interaction, we propose a novel form of the perturbation theory contribution to the density functional in terms of weighted densities, inspired by fundamental measure theory. We apply this functional in order to study the effective one-body interaction due to the liquid-vapor interface of the solvent acting on a dilute component of dissolved nano particles. The effective one-body interaction attracts the nano particles strongly to the interface. We show that this effective interaction potential can be calculated either from the density profiles of the full mixture, at low but non-vanishing concentrations of the nano particles, or by employing the Widom insertion theorem in the dilute limit of vanishing density of nano particles. Both routes display excellent agreement.
References in corpus (6)
- Depletion potential in hard-sphere mixtures: theory and applications
- Theory of asymmetric non-additive binary hard-sphere mixtures
- The standard mean-field treatment of inter-particle attraction in classical DFT is better than one might expect
- Depletion potentials in highly size-asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures: Comparison of accurate simulation results with theory
- Solvent mediated interactions close to fluid-fluid phase separation: microscopic treatment of bridging in a soft core fluid
- Microscopic theory of solvent mediated long range forces: influence of wetting