Equilibrium Structure and Properties of Colloidal Dispersions

Abstract

Tailored colloidal dispersions serve as excellent model many-body systems and, therefore, offer an attractive opportunity to study a number of problems in condensed matter physics, including phase transitions and critical phenomena in systems interacting through soft, long-ranged potentials, glass transitions in atomic systems, and two-dimensional phase transitions. Consequently, self-organization in colloidal dispersions has attracted the attention of chemists and physicists in recent years. Here, we present an introduction to order/disorder transitions in model colloidal dispersions. After a brief review of the physical basis of self-organization and crystallization in colloids, some recent attempts to predict the equilibrium structure and properties of dispersions using effective hard-sphere models, statistical mechanical perturbation theories and integral equation approaches are reviewed, with emphasis on the last method in view of the popularity of integral equation methods in analyzing the structure of globular proteins and micelles.