Phase behavior and structure of binary hard-sphere mixtures

Abstract

By integrating out the degrees of freedom of the small spheres in a binary mixture of large and small hard spheres, we derive an explicit effective Hamiltonian for the large spheres. Using the two-body (depletion potential) contribution to this effective Hamiltonian in simulations, we find stable fluid-solid and both metastable fluid-fluid and solid-solid coexistence in a mixture with size ratio q ­ 0.1. For q ­ 0.05 the solid-solid coexistence becomes stable.