Effects of polymer nonideality on depletion-induced phase behaviour of colloidal disks and rods

Abstract

Abstract Colloidal dispersions composed of either platelets or rods exhibit liquid crystalline phase behaviour that is strongly influenced by the addition of nonadsorbing polymers. In this work we examined how polymer segment–segment interactions affect this phase behaviour as compared to using either penetrable hard spheres (PHS) or ideal (‘ghost’) chains as depletants. We find that the simplified polymer description predicts the same phase diagram topologies as the more involved polymer descriptions. Therefore the PHS description is still adequate for qualitative predictions. For sufficiently large polymer sizes we find however that the precise polymer description significantly alters the locations of the phase coexistence regions. Especially the stability region of isotropic–isotropic coexistence is affected by the polymer interactions. To illustrate the quantitative effects some examples are presented.