Phase diagram of two-dimensional binary Yukawa mixtures

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe have used Ramakrishnan–Yussouff (RY) density functional theory (DFT) to explore the topology of the phase diagram of two-component charge stabilised colloidal suspensions confined to a two-dimensional plane. The particles of the system interact via purely repulsive soft core Yukawa potential. Pair correlation functions (PCFs) used as input informations in DFT were calculated by solving both the hypernetted chain (HNC) and Percus–Yevick (PY) integral equation theories. To test the relative performance of the HNC and PY theories in the context of phase transitions, we have also studied the corresponding one-component systems. We found that RY DFT with HNC PCFs does not stabilise solid in both the one- and two-component cases, whereas the PY theory does. By considering the freezing into the substitutionally disordered triangular solid, we found that the temperature-composition phase diagrams of the binary mixture are narrow spindles whose thickness depends on the symmetry of the mixture components and the value of the screening constant of the Yukawa potential. Although the phase diagram obtained by RY DFT with structural inputs calculated by the PY theory is found to be shifted to higher temperature region in the temperature-composition plane, however, it captures qualitatively all the essential features of the phase diagram. Our results are in principle verifiable through computer simulations and experiments.