Effective interaction between hard sphere colloidal particles in a polymerizing Yukawa solvent

The effective interaction between colloidal hard sphere particles in a Yuka wa solvent that can polymerize with the formation of chains and rings is st udied and compared with the corresponding results for colloidal hard sphere particles in a solvent of polymerizing hard spheres. The attractive nature of the polymerizing Yukawa solvent particles induces significant changes i n the effective interactions between the colloid particles as compared to a polymerizing solvent of hard spheres that was investigated in previous stu dies. The results for the colloid-solvent mixture are obtained using the as sociative Percus-Yevick approximation for Wertheim's Ornstein-Zernike integ ral equation; the colloidal species are taken at a nonvanishing but very sm all concentration throughout this article. We present the effects of the si ze ratio of colloid spheres to solvent spheres, the degree of polymerizatio n, and the solvent density on the effective interactions between colloid an d solvent particles. The intercolloidal potential of mean force (PMF) is fo und to be highly dependent on these parameters for Wertheim's model. It is found that the correlations between colloid particles obtained using the Yu kawa solvent model are longer ranged and more attractive than those found u sing the hard sphere solvent model. A greater depletion of the solvent dens ity around the colloidal particles is also observed for the Yukawa solvent model as compared to the hard sphere model; an increased polymer chain leng th also enhances the depletion of the solvent density. The PMF is found to be oscillatory in structure. The oscillatory structure also depends upon th e average polymer chain length, specifically, the oscillatory structure in the PMF is strongly diminished as the average polymer chain length increase s. Additionally, as the average polymer length increases, the attraction at the colloid-colloid contact distance decreases. (C) 1999 American Institut e of Physics. [S0021-9606(99)50916-1].