Theoretical and numerical study of the phase diagram of patchy colloids: Ordered and disordered patch arrangements

Abstract

We report theoretical and numerical evaluations of the phase diagram for a model of patchy particles. Specifically, we study hard spheres whose surface is decorated by a small number f of identical sites ("sticky spots") interacting via a short-ranged square-well attraction. We theoretically evaluate, solving the Wertheim theory, the location of the critical point and the gas-liquid coexistence line for several values of f and compare them to the results of Gibbs and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. We study both ordered and disordered arrangements of the sites on the hard-sphere surface and confirm that patchiness has a strong effect on the phase diagram: the gas-liquid coexistence region in the temperature-density plane is significantly reduced as f decreases. We also theoretically evaluate the locus of specific heat maxima and the percolation line.