• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Theoretical and numerical study of the phase diagram of patchy colloids: Ordered and disordered patch arrangements
  • Contributor: Bianchi, Emanuela; Tartaglia, Piero; Zaccarelli, Emanuela; Sciortino, Francesco
  • Published: AIP Publishing, 2008
  • Published in: The Journal of Chemical Physics, 128 (2008) 14
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1063/1.2888997
  • ISSN: 0021-9606; 1089-7690
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: We report theoretical and numerical evaluations of the phase diagram for a model of patchy particles. Specifically, we study hard spheres whose surface is decorated by a small number f of identical sites (“sticky spots”) interacting via a short-ranged square-well attraction. We theoretically evaluate, solving the Wertheim theory, the location of the critical point and the gas-liquid coexistence line for several values of f and compare them to the results of Gibbs and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. We study both ordered and disordered arrangements of the sites on the hard-sphere surface and confirm that patchiness has a strong effect on the phase diagram: the gas-liquid coexistence region in the temperature-density plane is significantly reduced as f decreases. We also theoretically evaluate the locus of specific heat maxima and the percolation line.