Phase stability of colloidal mixtures of spheres and rods

We determined the phase boundaries of aqueous mixtures containing colloidal rod-like fd-viruses and polystyrene spheres using diffusing-wave spectroscopy and compared the results with free volume theory predictions. Excluded volume interactions in mixtures of colloidal rods and spheres lead to mediated depletion interactions. The strength and range of this attractive interaction depend on the concentrations of the particles, the length L and diameter D of the rods, and the radius R of the spheres. At strong enough attraction, this depletion interaction leads to phase separation. We experimentally determined the rod and sphere concentrations where these phase transitions occur by systematically varying the size ratios L/R and D/R and the aspect ratio L/D. This was done by using spheres with different radii and modifying the effective diameter of the rods through either the ionic strength of the buffer or anchoring a polymeric brush to the surface of the rods. The observed phase transitions were from a binary fluid to a colloidal gas/liquid phase coexistence that occurred already at very low concentrations due to the depletion efficiency of highly anisotropic rods. The experimentally measured phase transitions were compared to phase boundaries obtained using free volume theory (FVT), a well established theory for calculating the phase behavior of colloidal particles mixed with depletants. We find good correspondence between the experimental phase transitions and the theoretical FVT model where the excluded volume of the rod-like depletants was explicitly accounted for in both the reservoir and the system