Wetting transitions in polydisperse fluids

Abstract

The properties of the coexisting bulk gas and liquid phases of a polydisperse fluid depend not only on the prevailing temperature, but also on the overall parent density. As a result, a polydisperse fluid near a wall will exhibit density-driven wetting transitions inside the coexistence region. We propose a likely topology for the wetting phase diagram, which we test using Monte Carlo simulations of a model polydisperse fluid at an attractive wall, tracing the wetting line inside the cloud curve and identifying the relationship to prewetting.

4 Pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (6)

• Multicanonical Ensemble: A New Approach to Simulate First-order Phase Transitions
• Predicting phase equilibria in polydisperse systems
• Wetting and Capillary Condensation in Symmetric Polymer Blends: A comparison between Monte Carlo Simulations and Self-Consistent Field Calculations
• Finite-size scaling and particle size cutoff effects in phase separating polydisperse fluids
• Accurate simulation estimates of cloud points of polydisperse fluids
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Phase behaviour of polydisperse spheres: simulation strategies and an application to the freezing transition
• Phase separation dynamics of polydisperse colloids: a mean-field lattice-gas theory
• Wetting transitions of polymer solutions: Effects of chain length and chain stiffness
• Smectic and columnar ordering in length-polydisperse fluids of parallel hard cylinders