Effect of Size Polydispersity on Melting of Charged Colloidal Systems

Abstract

We introduce simple prescriptions of the Yukawa potential to describe the effect of size polydispersity and macroion shielding effect in charged colloidal systems. The solid-liquid phase boundaries were presented with the Lindemann criterion based on molecular dynamics simulations. Compared with the Robbins-Kremer-Grest simulation results, a deviation of melting line is observed at small $\lambda$, which means large macroion screening length. This deviation of phase boundary is qualitatively consistent with the simulation result of the nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann equation with full many-body interactions. It is found that this deviation of the solid-liquid phase behaviour is sensitive to the screening parameter.