Entropic wetting and many-body induced layering in a model colloid-polymer mixture

Phys Rev Lett. 2002 Nov 11;89(20):208303. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.208303. Epub 2002 Oct 29.

Abstract

We develop an efficient simulation scheme to study a model suspension of equally sized colloidal hard spheres and nonadsorbing ideal polymer coils, both in bulk and adsorbed against a planar hard wall. The many-body character of the polymer-mediated effective interactions between the colloids yields a bulk phase diagram and adsorption phenomena that differ substantially from those found for pairwise simple fluids; e.g., we find an anomalously large bulk liquid regime and, far from the bulk triple point, three layering transitions in the partial wetting regime prior to a transition to complete wetting by colloidal liquid.