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We investigate the phase ordering (pattern formation) of systems of two-dimensional core-shell particles using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations and classical density functional theory (DFT). The particles interact via a pair potential having a hard core and a repulsive square shoulder. Our simulations show that on cooling, the liquid state structure becomes increasingly characterized by long wavelength density modulations and on further cooling forms a variety of other phases, including clustered, striped, and other patterned phases. In DFT, the hard core part of the potential is treated using either fundamental measure theory or a simple local density approximation, whereas the soft shoulder is treated using the random phase approximation. The different DFTs are benchmarked using large-scale grand-canonical-MC and Gibbs-ensemble-MC simulations, demonstrating their predictive capabilities and shortcomings. We find that having the liquid state static structure factor S(k) for wavenumber k is sufficient to identify the Fourier modes governing both the liquid and solid phases. This allows us to identify from easier-to-obtain liquid state data the wavenumbers relevant to the periodic phases and to predict roughly where in the phase diagram these patterned phases arise., (© 2024 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).)

Patchy particles are an intriguing subject of study and indeed a model system in the field of soft matter physics. In recent years, patchy particle models have been applied to describe a wide variety of systems, including colloidal crystals, macromolecular interactions, liquid crystals, and nanoparticle assemblies. Given the importance of the topic, rationalizing and capturing the basic features of these models is crucial to their correct application in specific systems. In this study, we extend the ion-activated attractive patchy particles model previously employed to elucidate the phase behavior of protein solutions in the presence of trivalent salts. Our extension incorporates the effect of repulsion between unoccupied and occupied binding sites, depicted as patches. Furthermore, we examine the influence of model parameters on the liquid-vapor coexistence region within the phase diagram, employing numerical methods. A deeper understanding of this model will facilitate a better comprehension of the effects observed in experiments., (© 2024 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.)

We developed impedance-matched metal-powder low-pass filters based on coplanar waveguide design and characterized them at room temperature and 77.4 K. The coplanar waveguide metal-powder (CPW-MP) filters have a return loss better than 9.8 dB at frequencies up to 10 GHz at 77.4 K. We find that the filter attenuation per length scales linearly with frequency from 29 to 220 dB/m within the 1-5 GHz frequency range at 77.4 K, achieving the total attenuation above 100 dB for the 1 m-long CPW-MP filter at frequencies above 2 GHz. The CPW-MP filter integrated with the multipole LC filter demonstrates the low cut-off frequency, the attenuation above 100 dB in the stop band, and the high roll-off of 590 dB per decade. The proposed CPW-MP filter is easy to fabricate, has very good thermal-shock resistance, is flexible for integration with other types of low-pass filters, delivers the same performance as classical cryogenic filters, is more compact compared to 50 Ω coax cables with the same type of lossy dielectric, and provides ample opportunities for further miniaturization., (© 2024 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).)

We develop a model for the thermodynamics and evaporation dynamics of aerosol droplets of a liquid, such as water, surrounded by gas. When the temperature and the chemical potential (or equivalently the humidity) are such that the vapor phase is in the thermodynamic equilibrium state, then, of course, droplets of the pure liquid evaporate over a relatively short time. However, if the droplets also contain nanoparticles or any other non-volatile solute, then the droplets can become thermodynamically stable. We show that the equilibrium droplet size depends strongly on the amount and solubility of the nanoparticles within, i.e., on the nature of the particle interactions with the liquid and, of course, also on the vapor temperature and chemical potential. We develop a simple thermodynamic model for such droplets and compare predictions with results from a lattice density functional theory that takes as input the same particle interaction properties, finding very good agreement. We also use dynamical density functional theory to study the evaporation/condensation dynamics of liquid from/to droplets as they equilibrate with the vapor, thereby demonstrating droplet stability., (© 2023 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).)

The osmotic second virial coefficient B2 is an important parameter to describe the interactions and phase behavior of protein solutions, including colloidal systems and macromolecular solutions. Another key parameter to describe the driving force of the nucleation of a new phase is the supersaturation, which is used in the classical nucleation theory framework and is connected with the favorable contribution in the Gibbs free energy in the bulk solution. In this article, we establish a connection between B2 calculated from small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) data and the values of B2 obtained from supersaturation measurements using thermodynamics considerations. The values of the second virial coefficient calculated employing this method agree with those determined via SAXS in the region near the liquid-liquid phase separation border for human serum albumin and bovine serum albumin. The general relations adopted are shown to be useful for the estimation of the second virial coefficient B2 for globular proteins, in the proximity of the binodal biphasic coexistent region., (© 2023 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.)

To explore the curvature dependence of solid-fluid interfacial thermodynamics, we calculate, using Grand Canonical Monte Carlo simulation, the surface free energy for a 2d hard-disk fluid confined in a circular hard container of radius R as a function of the bulk packing fraction η and wall curvature C̄=-1/R. (The curvature is negative because the surface is concave.) Combining this with our previous data [Martin et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 124, 7938-7947 (2020)] for the positive curvature case (a hard-disk fluid at a circular wall, C̄=+1/R), we obtain a complete picture of surface thermodynamics in this system over the full range of positive and negative wall curvatures. Our results show that γ is linear in C̄ with a slope that is the same for both positive and negative wall curvatures, with deviations seen only at high negative curvatures (strong confinement) and high density. This observation indicates that the surface thermodynamics of this system is consistent with the predictions of so-called morphometric thermodynamics at both positive and negative curvatures. In addition, we show that classical density functional theory and a generalized scaled particle theory can be constructed that give excellent agreement with the simulation data over most of the range of curvatures and densities. For extremely high curvatures, where only one or two disks can occupy the container at maximum packing, it is possible to calculate γ exactly. In this limit, the simulations and density functional theory calculations are in remarkable agreement with the exact results.

Suspended colloids are often considered as models for molecules, which are sufficiently big so that they can be observed directly in (light) microscopes and for which the effective interaction among each other can be tailored. The Asakura-Oosawa model of ideal colloid-polymer mixtures captures the idea of tuning the interaction between the colloids via a potential, which possesses a range set by the size of the polymers and an attractive strength characterized by the (reservoir) number density of the polymers, which plays the role of an inverse temperature. The celebrated Asakura-Oosawa depletion potential allows one to recreate the bulk phase diagram of a simple fluid by employing a colloid-polymer mixture. This has been verified in theory, by computer simulations, and via experiments. Here, we study the phase behavior of a confined colloid-polymer mixture with two polymer species. The sizes and densities are chosen such that the resulting bulk phase diagram exhibits a second stable critical point within the framework of the classical density functional theory. Our results suggest that a suitably tuned colloid-polymer mixture can be an interesting model system to study fluids with two critical points.

If, in a hard sphere fluid, a single (test) particle is fixed, the other particles display a density profile that possesses long-ranged oscillations. Surprisingly, one can show via classical density functional theory that it takes a simple, purely repulsive (external) potential with a finite range in addition to the fixed hard sphere that forces these oscillations to vanish completely. This can give rise to interesting phenomena; however, it gained little attention in the past. In this work, we use the potential in question as an inter-component interaction in a binary hard-sphere mixture, where it is shown that the effective interaction induced by one component resembles qualitatively the well-known Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij potential and can lead to a liquid-gas phase transition in the other component.

For a standard model of patchy colloidal fluids with patch number M = 2, where chain formation (polymerization) occurs, we show that Wertheim theory predicts critical behavior at vanishing density and temperature. The analysis is based on determining lines in the phase diagram of maximal correlation length and compressibility. Simulation studies identify the latter line and confirm our prediction of Fisher-Widom crossover, i.e., the asymptotic decay of the pair correlation function changes from monotonic to damped oscillatory as the density is increased. For M > 2, it is known that phase separation occurs with a true critical point. Our results support the notion that a "disappearing" critical point occurs in the limit M = 2 and we uncover its remnants.

We revisit the competition between attractive and repulsive interparticle forces in simple fluids and how this governs and connects the macroscopic phase behavior and structural properties, as manifested in pair correlation functions. We focus on the asymptotic decay of the total correlation function h(r) which is, in turn, controlled by the form of the pair direct correlation function c(r). The decay of rh(r) to zero can be exponential (monotonic) if attraction dominates repulsion and exponentially damped oscillatory otherwise. The Fisher-Widom (FW) line separates the phase diagram into two regions characterized by the two different types of asymptotic decays. We show that there is a new and physically intuitive thermodynamic criterion which approximates well the actual FW line. This new criterion defines a line where the isothermal compressibility takes its ideal gas value χ T =χ T id . We test our hypothesis by considering four commonly used models for simple fluids. In all cases, the new criterion yields a line in the phase diagram that is close to the actual FW line for the thermodynamic state points that are most relevant. We also investigate (Widom) lines of maximal correlation length, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between the true and Ornstein-Zernike correlation lengths.

We investigate bulk structural properties of tetravalent associating particles within the framework of classical density functional theory, building upon Wertheim's thermodynamic perturbation theory. To this end, we calculate density profiles within an effective test-particle geometry and compare to radial distribution functions obtained from computer simulations. We demonstrate that a modified version of the functional proposed by Yu and Wu [J. Chem. Phys. 116 , 7094 (2002)] based on fundamental measure theory for hard spheres produces accurate results, although the functional does not satisfy the exactly known low-density limit. In addition, at low temperatures where particles start to form an amorphous tetrahedral network, quantitative differences between simulations and theory emerge due to the absence of geometrical information regarding the patch arrangement in the latter. Indeed, here we find that the theory fits better to simulations of the floating-bond model [E. Zaccarelli et al. , J. Chem. Phys. 127 , 174501 (2007)], which exhibits a weaker tetrahedral order due to more flexible bonds between particles. We also demonstrate that another common density functional approach by Segura et al. [Mol. Phys. 90 , 759 (1997)] fails to capture fundamental structural properties.

A generalized scaled-particle theory for the uniform hard-disk mixture is derived in the spirit of the White Bear II free energy of the hard-sphere fluid [H. Hansen-Goos and R. Roth, J. Phys. C: Condens. Matter 18 , 8413 (2006)]. The theory provides a very simple result for the interfacial free energy γ of the hard-disk fluid at a planar hard wall (which in d = 2 is a line) in terms of the equation of state. To complement and assess the theory, we perform Monte Carlo simulations from which we obtain γ using Gibbs-Cahn integration. While we find excellent overall agreement between theory and simulation, it also becomes apparent that the set of scaled-particle variables available in d = 2 is too limited, prohibiting a quasi-exact result for γ . Furthermore, this is reflected in the mixture equation of state resulting from our theory, which, similar to a previous attempt by Santos et al. [Mol. Phys. 96 , 1 (1999)], displays a small but systematic deviation from simulations.

We propose density functional theory for diblock copolymers in two dimensions. Our theoretical framework is based on Wertheim's first order thermodynamic perturbation theory. Using the proposed approach, we investigate the structure and phase behavior of monolayers of symmetric diblock copolymers. We find that the phase behavior of symmetric diblock copolymer monolayers is similar to that in 3D. This includes the scaling of the equilibrium lamellar width with chain length. We find that the topology of the resulting phase diagrams depends on the chain length and the unlike segment interaction incompatibility and involves either one, two, or three triple points (one of them being the peritectic point). We expect that a similar phase behavior could be obtained for monolayers of colloidal suspensions with carefully tuned interparticle interactions.

As in Paper I of this series of papers [S. M. Cattes et al., J. Chem. Phys. 144, 194704 (2016)], we study a Heisenberg fluid confined to a nanoscopic slit pore with smooth walls. The pore walls can either energetically discriminate specific orientations of the molecules next to them or are indifferent to molecular orientations. Unlike in Paper I, we employ a version of classical density functional theory that allows us to explicitly account for the stratification of the fluid (i.e., the formation of molecular layers) as a consequence of the symmetry-breaking presence of the pore walls. We treat this stratification within the White Bear version (Mark I) of fundamental measure theory. Thus, in this work, we focus on the interplay between local packing of the molecules and orientational features. In particular, we demonstrate why a critical end point can only exist if the pore walls are not energetically discriminating specific molecular orientations. We analyze in detail the positional and orientational order of the confined fluid and show that reorienting molecules across the pore space can be a two-dimensional process. Last but not least, we propose an algorithm based upon a series expansion of Bessel functions of the first kind with which we can solve certain types of integrals in a very efficient manner.

Using dynamical density functional theory (DDFT), we theoretically study Brownian self-diffusion and structural relaxation of hard disks and compare to experimental results on quasi two-dimensional colloidal hard spheres. To this end, we calculate the self-van Hove correlation function and distinct van Hove correlation function by extending a recently proposed DDFT-approach for three-dimensional systems to two dimensions. We find that the theoretical results for both self-part and distinct part of the van Hove function are in very good quantitative agreement with the experiments up to relatively high fluid packing fractions of roughly 0.60. However, at even higher densities, deviations between the experiment and the theoretical approach become clearly visible. Upon increasing packing fraction, in experiments, the short-time self-diffusive behavior is strongly affected by hydrodynamic effects and leads to a significant decrease in the respective mean-squared displacement. By contrast, and in accordance with previous simulation studies, the present DDFT, which neglects hydrodynamic effects, shows no dependence on the particle density for this quantity.

In this paper, we discuss the ability to numerically minimize the grand potential of hard disks in two-dimensional and of hard spheres in three-dimensional space within the framework of classical density functional and fundamental measure theory on modern graphics cards. Our main finding is that a massively parallel minimization leads to an enormous performance gain in comparison to standard sequential minimization schemes. Furthermore, the results indicate that in complex multi-dimensional situations, a heavy parallel minimization of the grand potential seems to be mandatory in order to reach a reasonable balance between accuracy and computational cost.

The minimization of the functional of the grand potential within the framework of classical density functional theory in three spatial dimensions can be numerically very demanding. The Picard iteration, that is often employed, is very simple and robust but can be rather slow. While a number of different algorithms for optimization problems have been suggested, there is still great need for additional strategies. Here, we present an approach based on the limited memory Broyden algorithm that is efficient and relatively simple to implement. We demonstrate the performance of this algorithm with the minimization of an inhomogeneous bulk structure of a fluid with competing interactions. For the problems we studied, we find that the presented algorithm improves performance by roughly a factor of three.

We study structural relaxation of colloidal hard spheres undergoing Brownian motion using dynamical density functional theory. Contrary to the partial linearization route [D. Stopper et al., Phys. Rev. E 92, 022151 (2015)] which amounts to using different free energy functionals for the self and distinct part of the van Hove function G(r, t), we put forward a unified description employing a single functional for both components. To this end, interactions within the self part are removed via the zero-dimensional limit of the functional with a quenched self component. In addition, we make use of a theoretical result for the long-time mobility in hard-sphere suspensions, which we adapt to the inhomogeneous fluid. Our results for G(r, t) are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations even in the dense liquid phase. In particular, our theory accurately yields the crossover from free diffusion at short times to the slower long-time diffusion in a crowded environment.

The influence of the polar, aprotic solvent propylene carbonate on the interfacial structure of the ionic liquid (IL) 1-butyl-1-methylpyrrolidinium tris(pentafluoroethyl)trifluorophosphate on sapphire was investigated by high-energy x-ray reflectivity. Experiments at solvent concentrations between 17 mol. % and 83 mol. % bridge the gap between diluted electrolytes described by the classical Gouy-Chapman theory and pure ionic liquids. Analysis of our experimental data revealed interfacial profiles comprised of alternating anion and cation enriched regions decaying gradually into the bulk liquid. With increasing solvent concentration, we observed a decrease in correlation length of the interfacial layering structure. At high ion concentrations, solvent molecules were found to accumulate laterally within the layers. By separating like-charged ions, they reduce their Coulomb repulsion. The results are compared with the bulk structure of IL/solvent blends probed by x-ray scattering and predictions from fundamental fluid theory.

Two-dimensional hard disks are a fundamentally important many-body model system in classical statistical mechanics. Despite their significance, a comprehensive experimental data set for two-dimensional single component and binary hard disks is lacking. Here, we present a direct comparison between the full set of radial distribution functions and the contact values of a two-dimensional binary colloidal hard sphere model system and those calculated using fundamental measure theory. We find excellent quantitative agreement between our experimental data and theoretical predictions for both single component and binary hard disk systems. Our results provide a unique and fully quantitative mapping between experiments and theory, which is crucial in establishing the fundamental link between structure and dynamics in simple liquids and glass forming systems.

Two-dimensional hard-particle systems are rather easy to simulate but surprisingly difficult to treat by theory. Despite their importance from both theoretical and experimental points of view, theoretical approaches are usually qualitative or at best semi-quantitative. Here, we present a density functional theory based on the ideas of fundamental measure theory for two-dimensional hard-disk mixtures, which allows for the first time an accurate description of the structure of the dense fluid and the equation of state for the solid phase within the framework of density functional theory. The properties of the solid phase are obtained by freely minimizing the functional.

The morphometric approach (MA) is a powerful tool for calculating a solvation free energy (SFE) and related quantities of solvation thermodynamics of complex molecules. Here, we extend it to a solvent consisting of m components. In the integral equation theories, the SFE is expressed as the sum of m terms each of which comprises solute-component j correlation functions (j = 1,..., m). The MA is applied to each term in a formally separate manner: The term is expressed as a linear combination of the four geometric measures, excluded volume, solvent-accessible surface area, and integrated mean and Gaussian curvatures of the accessible surface, which are calculated for component j. The total number of the geometric measures or the coefficients in the linear combinations is 4m. The coefficients are determined in simple geometries, i.e., for spherical solutes with various diameters in the same multicomponent solvent. The SFE of the spherical solutes are calculated using the radial-symmetric integral equation theory. The extended version of the MA is illustrated for a protein modeled as a set of fused hard spheres immersed in a binary mixture of hard spheres. Several mixtures of different molecular-diameter ratios and compositions and 30 structures of the protein with a variety of radii of gyration are considered for the illustration purpose. The SFE calculated by the MA is compared with that by the direct application of the three-dimensional integral equation theory (3D-IET) to the protein. The deviations of the MA values from the 3D-IET values are less than 1.5%. The computation time required is over four orders of magnitude shorter than that in the 3D-IET. The MA thus developed is expected to be best suited to analyses concerning the effects of cosolvents such as urea on the structural stability of a protein., (© 2011 American Institute of Physics)

We present a high energy x-ray reflectivity study of the density profiles of water and ice at hydrophobic and hydrophilic substrates. At the hydrophobic water/octadecyl-trichlorosilane (water-OTS) interface, we find clear evidence for a thin density depletion layer with an integrated density deficit corresponding to approximately 40% of a monolayer of water molecules. We discuss the experimental results in terms of a simple model of hydrophobic/hydrophilic solid-liquid interfaces. Our results also exclude the presence of nanobubbles. A detailed study of possible radiation damage induced by the intense x-ray beam at the dry OTS surface and at the ice-OTS, as well as at water-OTS interfaces, discloses that noticeable damage is only induced at the water-OTS interface, and thus points to the dominant role of highly mobile radicals formed in bulk water close to the interface.

The authors study the phase behavior of mixtures of monodisperse colloidal spheres with a depletion agent which can have arbitrary shape and can possess a polydisperse size or shape distribution. In the low concentration limit considered here, the authors can employ the free-volume theory and take the geometry of particles of the depletion agent into account within the framework of fundamental measure theory. The authors apply their approach to study the phase diagram of a mixture of (monodisperse) colloidal spheres and two polydisperse polymer components. By fine tuning the distribution of the polymer, it is possible to construct a complex phase diagram which exhibits two stable critical points.

We analyze the depletion potential between large spheres in a multicomponent mixture of dense small spheres (up to seven components) using the integral equation theory (IET), in which semiempirical bridge functions are incorporated, and the insertion approach within the framework of density functional theory (DFT). The diameters of the small spheres considered are in the range of d(S)-5d(S). The results from the IET and DFT are in close agreement with each other. The depletion potential in the mixture is substantially different from that in a one-component system of dense small spheres with diameter d(S). In comparison with the latter, the former possesses in general a less pronounced oscillatory structure, and the free-energy barrier for large spheres to overcome before reaching the contact is significantly reduced. This tendency can be enhanced as the number of components increases. In a several-component mixture of small spheres whose diameters are suitably chosen and in which the packing fractions of the components share the same value, the depletion potential is essentially short ranged and attractive and possesses a sufficiently large, negative value at the contact.

We introduce an expansion of the equation of state for additive hard-sphere mixtures in powers of the total packing fraction with coefficients which depend on a set of weighted densities used in scaled particle theory and fundamental measure theory. We demand that the mixture equation of state recovers the quasiexact Carnahan-Starling [J. Chem. Phys. 51, 635 (1969)] result in the case of a one-component fluid and show from thermodynamic considerations and consistency with an exact scaled particle relation that the first and second orders of the expansion lead unambiguously to the Boublik-Mansoori-Carnahan-Starling-Leland [J. Chem. Phys. 53, 471 (1970); J. Chem. Phys. 54, 1523 (1971)] equation and the extended Carnahan-Starling equation introduced by Santos et al. [Mol. Phys. 96, 1 (1999)]. In the third order of the expansion, our approach allows us to define a new equation of state for hard-sphere mixtures which we find to be more accurate than the former equations when compared to available computer simulation data for binary and ternary mixtures. Using the new mixture equation of state, we calculate expressions for the surface tension and excess adsorption of the one-component fluid at a planar hard wall and compare its predictions to available simulation data.

Free-volume theory for understanding depletion phenomena in mixtures of two species is generally derived using scaled-particle theory for those specific entities. Here we first give a general scaled-particle method for convex bodies in terms of the characteristic geometrical measures of the depletion agent, i.e., its volume, surface area, and integrated mean curvature, in mixtures with hard spheres. Second, we show that similar results can be derived from fundamental-measure theory. This different approach allows us to get a deep insight into the meaning of the various contributions to the theory from a geometrical point of view. From these two methods we arrive at a generalized "recipe" to free-volume theory. This recipe can be based on a desired equation of state for any convex shape of the depletion agents and is also valid for (polydisperse) mixtures of those. This is illustrated by mixtures of spheres with ellipsoids, spheres with several geometries as models for disklike mesogens, e.g., gibbsite, as well as depletion of spheres due to bar-shaped colloids, e.g., goethite.

Using density functional theory we calculate the density profiles of a binary solvent adsorbed around a pair of big solute particles. All species interact via repulsive Gaussian potentials. The solvent exhibits fluid-fluid phase separation, and for thermodynamic states near to coexistence the big particles can be surrounded by a thick adsorbed "wetting" film of the coexisting solvent phase. On reducing the separation between the two big particles we find there can be a "bridging" transition as the wetting films join to form a fluid bridge. The effective (solvent mediated) potential between the two big particles becomes long ranged and strongly attractive in the bridged configuration. Within our mean-field treatment the bridging transition results in a discontinuity in the solvent mediated force. We demonstrate that accounting for the phenomenon of bridging requires the presence of a nonzero bridge function in the correlations between the solute particles when our model fluid is described within a full mixture theory based upon the Ornstein-Zernike equations.

We investigate the solvation of a hard spherical cavity, of radius R, immersed in a fluid for which the interparticle forces are short ranged. For thermodynamic states lying close to the liquid binodal, where the chemical potential deviation deltamu is identical with mu-muco(T) is very small and positive, complete wetting by gas (drying) occurs and two regimes of interfacial behavior can be identified. These are characterized by the length scale Rc=2gamma(gl)infinity/(Deltarhodeltamu), where gamma(gl)infinity is the planar gas-liquid surface tension and Deltarho is the difference in coexisting densities at temperature T. For R>Rc, the interfacial free energy and the density profile of the fluid near the hard wall can be expanded in powers of the curvature R(-1), in keeping with the analysis of Stillinger and Cotter [J. Chem. Phys. 55, 3449 (1971)]. In the other regime, R0, of the work of formation of a hard spherical cavity and of the Gibbs adsorption and the fluid density at contact with the wall. Our analysis, which is based on an effective interfacial Hamiltonian combined with exact statistical mechanical sum rules, is confirmed fully by the results of microscopic density functional calculations for a square-well fluid. We discuss the repercussions of our results for solvation phenomena, emphasizing that nonanalytic behavior equivalent to that we find for complete drying in solvophobic systems will also arise in the case of complete wetting, i.e. when liquid films are adsorbed on the surface of large (colloidal) particles or at curved substrates. We reassess various results in the important but neglected Stillinger-Cotter paper, where drying was not considered explicitly, in the light of our present analysis.

We investigate the decay of pair correlation functions in a homogeneous (bulk) binary mixture of hard spheres. At a given state point the asymptotic decay r-->infinity of all three correlation functions is governed by a common exponential decay length and a common wavelength of oscillations. Provided the mixture is sufficiently asymmetric, size ratios q less than or approximately 0.7, we find that the common wavelength reflects either the size of the small or that of the big spheres. By analyzing the (complex) poles of the partial structure factors we find a sharp structural crossover line in the phase diagram. On one side of this line the common wavelength is approximately the diameter of the smaller sized spheres whereas on the other side it is approximately the diameter of the bigger ones; the wavelength of the longest ranged oscillations changes discontinuously at the structural crossover line. Using density functional theory and Monte Carlo simulations we show that structural crossover also manifests itself in the intermediate range behavior of the pair correlation functions and we comment on the relevance of this observation for real (colloidal) mixtures. In highly asymmetric mixtures, q< or =0.1, where there is metastable fluid-fluid transition, we find a Fisher-Widom line with two branches. This line separates a region of the phase diagram where the decay of pair correlations is oscillatory from one in which it is monotonic., ((c) 2004 American Institute of Physics.)