Colloid-Induced Polymer Compression

Details Colloid-Induced Polymer Compression Colloid-Induced Polymer Compression

2003-02-28

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0302599v1

J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 14, 12051-12062 (2002)

Physics

Condensed Matter

Soft Condensed Matter

14 pages, 4 figures

Scientific paper

10.1088/0953-8984/14/46/312

We consider a model mixture of hard colloidal spheres and non-adsorbing polymer chains in a theta solvent. The polymer component is modelled as a polydisperse mixture of effective spheres, mutually noninteracting but excluded from the colloids, with radii that are free to adjust to allow for colloid-induced compression. We investigate the bulk fluid demixing behaviour of this model system using a geometry-based density-functional theory that includes the polymer size polydispersity and configurational free energy, obtained from the exact radius-of-gyration distribution for an ideal (random-walk) chain. Free energies are computed by minimizing the free energy functional with respect to the polymer size distribution. With increasing colloid concentration and polymer-to-colloid size ratio, colloidal confinement is found to increasingly compress the polymers. Correspondingly, the demixing fluid binodal shifts, compared to the incompressible-polymer binodal, to higher polymer densities on the colloid-rich branch, stabilizing the mixed phase.

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