chapter 1 section 1.10

OUTLINE OF THE THESIS

This thesis contains several computer simulation studies of the influence of the interaction potential range on phase behavior of colloidal dispersions. The first half of this thesis will be devoted to the phase behavior of colloidal systems consisting of spherical particles. The next chapter contains a numerical study of the phase diagram of a mixture of spherical colloids and rodlike polymers. In the subsequent chapter we address the question what the phase diagram will be like if we consider very short-ranged depletion interactions. It will turn out that the phase behavior of such mixtures is very sensitive to polydispersity of the colloids. As synthetic colloidal dispersions always exhibit some size polydispersity, we need to study the effect of polydispersity on the phase behavior of spherical colloids. The combination of polydispersity and short-ranged depletion interactions of spherical colloids, is studied at the end of chapter 3. The effect of polydispersity on the freezing transition of hard, spherical colloids is discussed in detail in chapter 4.

The second half of the thesis deals with the phase behavior of rodlike particles, and mixtures of rodlike particles and polymers. First, we investigate the full phase diagram of the simplest hard core model for rodlike particles, the hard spherocylinder, in chapter 5. Part of this phase diagram had been determined previously [26,27]. However, in the present study we investigate the phase behavior in all limiting cases (aspect ratio going from 1 to , density going from zero to close packing). In the subsequent chapter, we examine the effect of the addition of polymer on the phase behavior of spherocylinders. The last chapter comprises a study of phase separation in mixtures of rods and plates.

Quite a few of the numerical techniques that were used in the work described in this thesis, were either novel or non-standard. For the reader who is primarily interested in novel numerical techniques, we end this introduction with a list of the non-standard simulation methods that were employed in this thesis, and we indicate where they are described in the text.

Section 2.2.1
Configurational Bias Monte Carlo in the Gibbs-Ensemble for clusters of particles
Section 3.2.4
Simulations in the close packing limit for spheres
Section 5.5.2
Simulations in the close packing limit for spherocylinders
Section 5.3.2
Absolute free energy calculations in the liquid crystalline phases of hard sphero-cylinders
Section 5.6
Multiple overlap criterion for simulations of very long sphero-cylinders
Section 5.7
Simulations of hard sphero-cylinders in the limit
Section 5.3.3
Generalized Gibbs-Duhem integration for spherocylinders, to trace coexistence curves as a function of the aspect ratio
Section 4.3
Generalized Gibbs-Duhem integration to trace the freezing curve for polydisperse hard spheres, as a function of the polydispersity.
Section 4.2
Semi-grand ensemble description of polydisperse hard sphere systems
Section 4.5
Scaling of the polydisperse hard sphere systems
Section 6.3
Construction of an effective pair potential to model the polymer induced attraction between spherocylinders

chapter 1 section 1.10