What do emulsification failure and Bose-Einstein condensation have in common?

Abstract

Ideal bosons and classical ring polymers formed via self-assembly, are known to have the same partition function, and so analogous phase transitions. In ring polymers, the analogue of Bose-Einstein condensation occurs when a ring polymer of macroscopic size appears. We show that a transition of the same general form occurs within a whole class of systems with self-assembly, and illustrate it with the emulsification failure of a microemulsion phase of water, oil and surfactant. As with Bose-Einstein condensation, the transition occurs even in the absence of interactions.

7 pages, 1 figure, typeset with EUROTeX, uses epsfig

References in corpus (1)

• Optimal packing of polydisperse hard-sphere fluids II

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Long Cycles in the Infinite-Range-Hopping Bose-Hubbard Model with Hard Cores
• Infinite Cycles in Boson Lattice Models
• Polydispersity and optimal relaxation in the hard sphere fluid