2004/11/22 by A. J. Archer, R. Evans, R. Roth +1
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Block Copolymer Self-Assembly #Material Dynamics and Properties #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.1855878
published as J. Chem. Phys. 122, 084513 (2005) · 28 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2004/11/22 · openalex publication_date 2005/02/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Using density functional theory we calculate the density profiles of a binary solvent adsorbed around a pair of big solute particles. All species interact via repulsive Gaussian potentials. The solvent exhibits fluid-fluid phase separation, and for thermodynamic states near to coexistence the big particles can be surrounded by a thick adsorbed "wetting" film of the coexisting solvent phase. On reducing the separation between the two big particles we find there can be a "bridging" transition as the wetting films join to form a fluid bridge. The effective (solvent mediated) potential between the two big particles becomes long ranged and strongly attractive in the bridged configuration. Within our mean-field treatment the bridging transition results in a discontinuity in the solvent mediated force. We demonstrate that accounting for the phenomenon of bridging requires the presence of a nonzero bridge function in the correlations between the solute particles when our model fluid is described within a full mixture theory based upon the Ornstein-Zernike equations.