Pattern formation in binary fluid mixtures induced by short-range competing interactions

C Bores and E Lomba and A Perera and NG Almarza, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 143, 084501 (2015).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4928524

Molecular dynamics simulations and integral equation calculations of a simple equimolar mixture of diatomic molecules and monomers interacting via attractive and repulsive short-range potentials show the existence of pattern formation (microheterogeneity), mostly due to depletion forces away from the demixing region. Effective site-site potentials extracted from the pair correlation functions using an inverse Monte Carlo approach and an integral equation inversion procedure exhibit the features characteristic of a short-range attractive and a long-range repulsive potential. When charges are incorporated into the model, this becomes a coarse grained representation of a room temperature ionic liquid, and as expected, intermediate range order becomes more pronounced and stable. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.

Return to Publications page