Interfacial tension and nucleation in mixtures of colloids and long ideal polymer coils

Abstract

Mixtures of ideal polymers with hard spheres whose diameters are smaller than the radius of gyration of the polymer, exhibit extensive immiscibility. The interfacial tension between demixed phases of these mixtures is estimated, as is the barrier to nucleation. The barrier is found to scale linearly with the radius of the polymer, causing it to become large for large polymers. Thus for large polymers nucleation is suppressed and phase separation proceeds via spinodal decomposition, as it does in polymer blends.