Turbidity and critical behavior of a colloid-polymer system - art. no. 042401

The osmotic compressibility and correlation length of a colloid-polymer sys tem, consisting of grafted silica particles in cyclohexane in the presence of the soluble polymer polydimethylsiloxane, are determined by turbidity me asurements in the entire one-phase liquid region, with emphasis on the crit ical region, The renormalized critical exponents of the osmotic compressibi lity and the correlation length are found to be respectively gamma* = 1.39 +/- 0.01 and nu* = 0.71 +/- 0.01, while the amplitude of the correlation le ngth is 16.0 +/- 0.3 nm. Comparison is made with theoretical predictions.