Entropy-Driven Phase Transitions in Colloids: From spheres to anisotropic particles

Abstract

Colloidal particles with anisotropic interactions can be synthesized by controlling the shape of the particles. Exploiting the self-assembly of these novel colloidal building blocks calls for theoretical tools to predict the structure and phase behavior of these particles. This chapter describes an efficient simulation method to predict candidate structures and several techniques to calculate the free energy of the various phases. A natural starting point to study the self-assembled structures of these shape-anisotropic colloidal building blocks is to view them as hard particles. The analysis of hard particles is of fundamental relevance and raises problems that influence fields as diverse as condensed matter, mathematics, and computer science. Finally, the chapter presents an overview and discusses phase diagrams that have been determined using free-energy calculations in Monte Carlo simulations for binary mixtures of hard spheres and hard anisotropic particles.