Phase behavior and percolation in an equilibrium system of symmetrically interacting Janus disks on the triangular lattice

Abstract

A Janus particle has two distinct areas on its surface. Denoting the two areas as P (patch) and N (nonpatch), when two particles come close to each other, the strength of the PP interaction is usually different from that of the NN interaction. Recently the interplay between a rotational-symmetry-breaking continuous phase transition and percolation has been explored for an equilibrium system of asymmetrically interacting (i.e., attractive PP interaction, zero NN and PN interactions) Janus disks on the triangular lattice. By Monte Carlo simulation and finite-size scaling analysis, in this work we study an equilibrium system of symmetrically interacting (i.e., attractive PP and NN interactions with the same strength, zero PN interaction) Janus disks on the same lattice. By definition, the phase diagram in the T–θ plane is symmetric for systems with patch sizes θ below and above 90°. We determine the phase diagram and compare it with that of the asymmetric system. Similar to the latter system, for 60° < θ < 90°, a rotational-symmetry-breaking continuous phase transition and an anisotropic percolation transition are found in the symmetric system, though the transition points in the two systems are quite different. Phase crossover curves are found to be different, e.g., a continuous varying crossover line extends between θ = 0° and 90° for the symmetric model; and in the range 0° < θ ≤ 30°, along the crossover lines of the two models, the trends of 1/T vs. θ are opposite in the two systems. We understand the latter by analytically solving the models with two particles in 0° < θ ≤ 30°. These results are helpful for understanding close-packed systems of Janus disks with more complex interactions.