Two-dimensional chiral segregation of the bent hard needles model with Lennard-Jones sites

Abstract

Assuming the aggregates of a single chiral component as a pure phase, chiral segregation can be considered as a coexistence of two phases, therefore the formalisms of phase transitions in Statistical Mechanics can be applied. That is, chiral segregation can be considered as phase equilibrium. The standard mechanism to understand phase equilibrium considers the complete van der Waals forces, including repulsions and attractions. However, during the last few years, a particular kind of fluid–fluid equilibrium, explained in terms of only excluded volume effects, has gained important interest. This kind of phenomenon is known as depletion forces. In this paper, the contribution of these two mechanisms is investigated. In order to analyze the effect that repulsions and attractions have on chiral segregation we study a two-dimensional model, bent hard needles model. In one case only infinitely repulsive interactions are considered while in the second case, one and two Lennard-Jones (LJ) sites are added to model the complete van der Waals forces. In the first case, because of the nature of the model, the cause for chiral segregation is due to excluded volume effects that appear when the density of the system is sufficiently high. In the second case, the model proposed is more complex and besides the density the temperature also affects the phase separation. Monte Carlo simulations in the Gibbs ensemble (GMC) are used to perform this comparison. As a result, the segregation phase diagram is obtained for the infinitely repulsive model and that with two LJ sites. The important conclusions are that for some particular molecular geometries, repulsions are not able to produce chiral segregation at all, independently of density. However, when attractions are included the effect of repulsion is complemented and phase separation can be achieved even for those molecular geometries where infinitely repulsions were not able.