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Effective Potentials Induced by Mixtures of Patchy and Hard Co-solutes by Handle, Philip H.; Zaccarelli, Emanuela; Gnan, Nicoletta is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Effective Potentials Induced by Mixtures of Patchy and Hard Co-solutes about?

The addition of co-solutes to colloidal suspensions is often employed to induce tunable depletion interactions. In this work we investigate effective colloidal interactions arising from binary co-solute mixtures of hard spheres and patchy particles. By changing the relative concentration of the two species, we show that the resulting effective potential $V_\text{eff}$ continuously changes from the one obtained for a single-component hard sphere co-solute to that mediated by the single-component patchy particle co-solute. Interestingly, we find that, independently of the relative concentration of the two components, the resulting $V_\text{eff}$ is additive, i.e., it is well-described by the linear combination of the effective interactions mediated by respective pure co-solutes. However, a breakdown of the additivity occurs when the co-solute mixture is close to the onset of a demixing transition. These results represent a step forward in understanding and predicting colloidal behaviour in complex and crowded environments and for exploiting this knowledge to design targeted colloidal superstructures.

Author

Handle, Philip H.; Zaccarelli, Emanuela; Gnan, Nicoletta

Published

2021

Language

EN