Short ranged attraction and long ranged repulsion between two solute particles in asubcritical liquid solvent

Abstract

We calculate the effective interaction between two solute particles in a solvent ofLennard-Jones (LJ) particles in two dimensions where the solvent is in the stable liquidphase near the liquid–gas phase coexistence and the solute–solvent interaction is repulsive.Our grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations show that the effective interactionbetween two solute particles is attractive for separations between the solute particles up toa range of a few nanometres, beyond which the interaction exhibits a markedrepulsion. Such an effective interaction stabilizes clusters of nanometre (nm) sizes.