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Critical Casimir forces involving a chemically structured substrate

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 نشر من قبل Francesco Parisen Toldin
 تاريخ النشر 2010
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near their continous demixing phase transition we study the critical behavior of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, for the film geometry with one planar wall chemically structured such that there is a laterally alternating adsorption preference for the species of the binary liquid mixture. By means of Monte Carlo simulations and finite-size scaling analysis we determine the critical Casimir force and the corresponding universal scaling function.



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A recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 156101 (2009)] reports the experimental observation of aggregation of colloidal particles dispersed in a liquid mixture of heavy water and 3-methylpyridine. The experimental data are interpreted in terms of a mo del which accounts solely for the competing effects of the interparticle electrostatic repulsion and of the attractive critical Casimir force. Here we show, however, that the reported aggregation actually occurs within ranges of values of the correlation length and of the Debye screening length ruled out by the proposed model and that a significant part of the experimental data presented in the Letter cannot be consistently interpreted in terms of such a model.
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