Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 12: Soft Matter I
DY 12.3: Talk
Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 15:00–15:15, H47
Phase behavior of colloidal suspensions in critical solvents — •Thomas Friedrich Mohry1,2, Anna Maciołek1,2,3, and Siegfried Dietrich1,2 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung, Heisenbergstraße 3, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany — 2Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Theoretische und Angewandte Physik, Pfaffenwaldring 57, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany — 3Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Department III, Kasprzaka 44/52, PL-01-224 Warsaw, Poland
Colloidal systems are important both as model systems for statistical physics and for applications in material science. Close to a continuous phase transition of the solvent (e.g. the critical point of the mixing-demixing transition in a binary mixture) the correlated fluctuations result in an effective force between the immersed colloids, the so called critical Casimir forces. They exhibit the remarkable feature of universality and are sensitive to the temperature, the boundary conditions imposed by the colloids and the composition of the solvent. We present first theoretical results, concerning the influence of these critical Casimir forces on the phase behavior of the colloids.