Gas-liquid phase transition in a binary mixture with an interaction that creates constant density profiles.

Abstract

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.