Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 58: Computational Physics of Soft Matter II

CPP 58.3: Talk

Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 16:30–16:45, PC 203

Brownian Dynamics simulations on soft patchy particles made of isotropic spheres — •Malte Lütje — Universität Tübingen

Patchy Particles are widely used as a model system for proteins in a solution. We propose a dynamical model for patchy colloidal particles emerging from a binary mixture of particles of different size, "colloids" and "bonds". Both colloids and bonds interact with isotropic, but non-additive hard-sphere interactions, additionally the colloid-bond interaction contains a short-range, isotropic attraction. Our model resembles a soft version of the model studied by E. Zaccarelli et al. [1]

Equilibrium and dynamical properties of the mixture are investigated by Brownian Dynamics simulations. Due to the repulsion among the bonds a finite number of binding sites on a colloid is achieved.

We focus on a maximum number of four binding sites on each colloid, rendering possible a tetrahedral structure. Upon varying bond concentration, temperature and packing fraction φ of the colloids, we equilibrate the system and examine the resulting structures. Of particular interest is the transition from a locally clustered state at small volume fractions of colloids to the emerging tetrahedral network that was found in Ref. [1] for φ ≥ 0.22.

[1] E. Zaccarelli, F. Sciortino, P. Tartaglia, J. Chem. Phys. 127, 174501 (2007)