Depletion potentials in colloidal mixtures of spheres and rods

Abstract

We calculate the depletion potential between two hard spheres of radiiRs and thatbetween one hard sphere and a planar hard wall in a sea of hard rigid spherocylindrical rodsof length L andradius Rr.Unlike earlier studies our approach takes into account the true geometry of the problemand gives, to first order in the rod density, the exact depletion potential for all valuesof Rs,L, andRr.