print

Patchy particles in critical fluids

By: Nima Bafi and Piotr Nowakowski
From: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany.
At: C1, 1.4.14
[2021-09-30] 10:00

We study the critical Casimir interaction between two spherical colloids immersed in a binary liquid mixture close to its critical demixing point. The surface of each colloid prefers one species of the mixture with the exception of a circular patch of arbitrary size, where the other species is preferred. For such objects we calculate, within the Derjaguin approximation, the scaling function describing the critical Casimir potential, and we use it to derive the scaling functions for all components of the forces and torques acting on both colloids. The results are compared with available experimental data.