Depletion potential in the infinite dilution limit

The depletion force and depletion potential between two in principle unequal big hard spheres embedded in a multicomponent mixture of small hard spheres are computed using the Rational Function Approximation method for the structural properties of hard-sphere mixtures [S. B. Yuste, A. Santos, and M. Lopez de Haro, J. Chem. Phys. {bf 108}, 3683 (1998)]. The cases of equal solute particles and of one big particle and a hard planar wall in a background monodisperse hard-sphere fluid are explicitly analyzed. An improvement over the performance of the Percus-Yevick theory and good agreement with available simulation results are found