Generalized effective depletion potentials

Abstract

We propose that the behavior of asymmetric binary fluid mixtures with a large class of attractive or repulsive interparticle interactions can be understood by mapping onto effective non-additive hard-sphere models. The latter are best analyzed in terms of their underlying depletion potentials which can be exactly scaled onto known additive ones. By tuning the non-additivity, a wide variety of attractive or repulsive generalized depletion potential shapes and associated phase behavior can be ``engineered'', leading, for example, to two ways to stabilize colloidal suspensions by adding smaller particles.