The phase diagram of a polydisperse hard-sphere system is examined by numerical minimization of a discretized form of the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff free-energy functional. Crystalline and glassy local minima of the free energy are located and the phase diagram in the density-polydispersity plane is mapped out by comparing the free energies of different local minima. The crystalline phase disappears...

The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rodlike and platelike hard parallelepipeds is determined for aspect ratios kappa=5 and 15. All particles have equal volume, and polydispersity is introduced in a highly symmetric way. The corresponding binary mixture is known to have a biaxial phase for kappa=15, but to be unstable against demixing into two uniaxial nematics for kappa=5. T...

We have established the solid-fluid coexistence region for a system of polydisperse hard spheres with near Gaussian diameter distributions, as a function of polydispersity. Our approach employs Monte Carlo simulation in the isobaric semigrand ensemble with a Gaussian activity distribution. Gibbs-Duhem integration is used to trace the coexistence pressure as a function of the variance of the imp...

Abstract. A theoretical scheme for the calculation of the full phase diagram (including cloud and shadow curves, binodals and distribution functions of the coexisting phases) for colloidpolymer mixtures with polymer chain length polydispersity and hard-sphere colloidal and polymeric monomer sizes polydispersity is proposed. The scheme combines thermodynamic perturbation theory for associating f...

The effects of particle-size polydispersity on the initial susceptibilities of concentrated ferrofluids are analyzed using a combination of theory and computer simulation. The study is focused on a model ferrofluid with a prescribed magnetic-core diameter distribution, a fixed non-magnetic surface layer (corresponding to a demagnetized layer and adsorbed surfactant) and a combination of dipolar...

The densest amorphous packing of rigid particles is known as random close packing. It has long been appreciated that higher densities are achieved by using collections of particles with a variety of sizes. For spheres, the variety of sizes is often quantified by the polydispersity of the particle size distribution: the standard deviation of the radius divided by the mean radius. Several prior s...

I have studied the effects of polydispersity on the phase behaviour of suspensions of PMMA colloidal spheres on their own and in the presence of non-adsorbed polymer. I systematically explored the volume fraction–polydispersity (φ − σ) phase behaviour of hard spheres (with radii R =167, 244, 300 and 303nm) through direct observations and crystallography measurements. I observed normal crystalli...