Path-integral treatment of the liquid-gas transition: From simple fluids to microemulsions

Abstract

We propose a unified field-theoretic path-integral treatment of the liquid-gas transition occurring in simple neutral fluids, neutral monodisperse polymer solutions, and monodisperse neutral microemulsions. The theoretical results obtained indicate that all three systems belong to the same Ising-type universality class, which is strongly supported by the most recent experimental results on liquid-gas transitions.