Gas-liquid phase separation in oppositely charged colloids: stability and interfacial tension

Abstract

We study the phase behavior and the interfacial tension of the screened Coulomb (Yukawa) restricted primitive model (YRPM) of oppositely charged hard spheres with diameter s using Monte Carlo simulations. We determine the gas-liquid and gas-solid phase transition using free energy calculations and grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations for varying inverse Debye screening length k. We find that the gas-liquid phase separation is stable for k s <= 4, and that the critical temperature decreases upon increasing the screening of the interaction (decreasing the range of the interaction). In addition, we determine the gas-liquid interfacial tension using grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations. The interfacial tension decreases upon increasing the range of the interaction. In particular, we find that simple scaling can be used to relate the interfacial tension of the YRPM to that of the restricted primitive model, where particles interact with bare Coulomb interactions.