Criticality of colloids with three distinct interaction patches: As simple as A, B, C?

• Autor(a) principal: Tavares, Jose
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Teixeira, Paulo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/7469
• topic: Thermodynamic perturbation-theory; Colloids; Fluids; Particles; Behavior

We systematically study the phase behavior of a simple model of associating fluids which consists of hard spherical particles with three short-ranged attractive sites on their surfaces (sticky spots or patches), of types A, B, and C, that can form bonds with energy ij (i,j = A,B,C). We consider realizations of the model with one, two, or three nonzero ij. Using Wertheim’s first order perturbation theory of association, we establish the minimum requirements on the bond energies for the model to exhibit a liquid-vapor critical point, and investigate the nature of criticality in each case. As a preliminary, we rigorously show that, within this theory, particles with M identical sites do not condense if M < 3, a result that was previously conjectured, but never proved.