Macromolecular theory of solvation and structure in mixtures of colloids and polymers - art. no. 021514

The structural and thermodynamic properties of mixtures of colloidal sphere s and nonadsorbing polymer chains are studied within a general two-componen t macromolecular liquid state approach applicable for all size asymmetry ra tios. The dilute limits, when one of the components is at infinite dilution but the other concentrated, are presented and compared to field theory and to models that replace polymer coils with spheres. Whereas the derived ana lytical results compare well, qualitatively and quantitatively, with mean-f ield scaling laws where available, important differences from "effective sp here" approaches are found for large polymer sizes or semidilute concentrat ions.