Accurate calculation of three-body depletion interactions - art. no. 011403

We compute three-body depletion interactions in a hard-sphere mixture withi n the framework of density-functional theory and by considering the infinit e dilution limit of the functional. The results look very accurate and show three-body interactions much smaller than the pair depletion ones, reveali ng that these are strongly influenced by correlations and have a decay leng th similar to the two-body depletion potential. The results are compared wi th the predictions of the Asakura-Oosawa model for the triplet interactions .