The vapour-liquid transition of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions: an effective one-component description

Abstract

The low-density phase diagrams of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions of the Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek theory with an approximate effective one-component Hamiltonian given by the volume term and effective pair interactions, and of the classical theory (without including the volume term), are obtained from the hypernetted-chain integral equation at low colloidal charges. In the salt-free case both phase diagrams exhibit a vapour-liquid transition with short-ranged colloid-colloid correlations. This phase separation is compared to the vapour-liquid transition found in binary mixtures of highly asymmetrical hard spheres.