8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

P5.24Wed 711:10-14:00Ultra-soft colloid/polymer mixtures: structure and phasediagramManuel Camargo, 1 Barbara Lonetti, 1 Jörg Stellbrink, 2 Christos Likos, 3 andEmanuela Zaccarelli 41 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heinrich-Heine Universität, Universitätsstra 1,Room 25. 33. O2. 63 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany2 JCNS-1 and ICS-1, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany3 Wien Universität, Vienna, Austria4 Università di Roma, Rome, ItalyIn this work, we investigate binary mixtures of ultrasoft colloids and linear polymer chains by combiningsmall angle neutron scattering (SANS) and liquid state theory. We show that experimentaldata can be described by employing recently-developed effective interactions between the colloidand the polymer chains, in which both components are modeled as point particles in a coarsegrainedapproach, in which the monomers have been traced out. Without adjustable parametersquantitative agreement between experiment and theory in terms of structure factor, phase behaviorand concentration dependence of interaction length is achieved. Our work provides a comprehensivecharacterization of soft binary mixtures in terms of a microscopic, effective potential and istherefore a successful benchmark in the study of complex soft matter systems24